Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have created and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to switch on the function for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is equally easy - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.