Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

You can easily shield your content if you set up an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all shared hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 easy steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be all set. You don't require any computer programming expertise or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you can see all of the sites that are protected inside the very same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each 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 should use the protection tool we've created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your real images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is equally easy - get back to the very same section, check the box next to the specific site and then click on the Delete button.