Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It will not take more than a number of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security feature which we offer you even if this is the very first web hosting account which you use, since all of our hosting come with a simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it has the same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this function only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily enable the hotlink security function, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of generating an .htaccess file by hand within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will only have to select the site that needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.