Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security function that we offer you even if this is the very first hosting account which you use, because all of our hosting service feature a simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to 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'd like to enable this function only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function we provide. While the common method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can execute this automatically and you shall only need to select the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the needed file within the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.