Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

It shall not require more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature we offer even if this is the very first web hosting account that you use, since all of our Linux shared web hosting include a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers 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 will simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this service only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will simply have to choose the Internet site that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be generated straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.