Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It won't take more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function that we offer you even if this is the first website hosting account you use, because all our Linux shared packages come with a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this function only for a specific Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature which we provide. While the conventional technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you will only need to choose the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.