Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding 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 Web Hosting

It won't require more than a few clicks to activate the hotlink protection function which we offer even if this is the 1st web hosting account that you use, because all of our Linux web hosting packages feature a very simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same intuitive point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your consent, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand in the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll only have to pick the Internet site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be created straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Disabling it is just as fast - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.