Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else could also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our cloud hosting service and the only 2 things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will simply have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website instead of your real images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the very same section, check the box next to the given website and then click on the Delete button.