Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also build a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you create an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting package deals which we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 simple steps - pick the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any computer programming skills or any experience with such matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection eventually, you could see all the websites that are protected inside the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button beside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and select the domain or subdomain your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is as easy - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.