Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
You can easily shield 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 could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared website hosting packages which we offer and could be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection could be enabled in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file within the primary folder or in a subfolder and you shall be good to go. You do not need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, due to the fact that there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you will be able to see all the websites which are protected within the very same section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.