Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone can be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud web hosting plans which we offer and can be accessed using the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in two basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't require any programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to remove the protection at some point, you could see all the sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button beside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you switch on this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to activate the function only for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is equally effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the particular site and then press the Delete button.