Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It won't take more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature that we offer even if this is the 1st hosting account you use, because all our shared website hosting plans come with a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it features the same exact intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this feature only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we offer. While the common technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you will only have to choose the website in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click from the same section.