Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
As our Linux hosting service feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to secure your content from displaying on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than a couple of clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you will just need to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Optionally, you can also select if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the needed location and shall include the required code inside it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so that you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The conventional technique to turn on server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool which you'll discover within the Hepsia CP, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to select the site which you intend to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content inside it. You could also use this feature for just one folder instead of the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could disable it with just one mouse click from the very same section of your Control Panel.