Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another person may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you generate an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but just in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in two simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You do not need any coding expertise or any experience with such matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some point, you could see all the sites which are protected within the same section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool which we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your actual images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to switch on the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - go back to the exact same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.