Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
Since our Linux website hosting include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and will add the needed code in it. All sites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside exactly the same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature which we offer you. While the standard method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to perform this automatically and you shall only have to pick the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.