Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It will not require more than several clicks to activate the hotlink protection function that we offer even if this is the first hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all our Linux website hosting include a simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the very same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this function only for a particular 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 disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you can easily activate the hotlink security function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file manually inside the website folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply need to choose the Internet site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you'd like to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as effortless - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.