Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It won't require more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function which we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all our Linux shared hosting feature a simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it provides the same easy-to-use point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this service only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you will be able to 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 create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we offer you. While the conventional method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can do this automatically and you shall only need to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.