Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
As our Linux shared plans come with a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Additionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall add the needed code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside exactly the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the conventional method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you will only have to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the required file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without complications even if you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.