Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It won't require more than several clicks to enable the hotlink security function we offer you even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, as all of our Linux hosting come with 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 CP, so it features the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature that we provide. While the regular way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you shall simply have to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the necessary file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without problems even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.