Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It shall not take more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature that we provide even if this is the 1st hosting account that you use, since all our Linux web hosting packages feature a very simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it features the same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this service only for a specific Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you may easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file manually inside the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll only need to choose the Internet site which should be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as fast - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.