Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not take more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function we provide even if this is the first hosting account you use, because all of our Linux shared packages feature a simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same easy-to-use point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this feature only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll simply have to choose the website which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be created directly within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.