Hotlinking Protection
What exactly is hotlink protection and just how does it work? When do you really need such?
Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
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Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our
Linux shared website hosting packages and the only two things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
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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 may use the security tool that we have developed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site rather than your real images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - go back to the same section, check the box next to the specific site and then press the Delete button.