Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

Because our Linux shared website hosting packages include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. In addition, you could also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the needed code inside it. All sites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the standard way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that is able to execute this automatically and you will simply have to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the necessary file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even if you have never used any hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.