Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody may be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It won't require more than several mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function that we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account you use, because all of our Linux shared hosting packages feature a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this feature only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the common technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to perform this automatically and you will only need to select the site in question and to determine whether our system should set up the needed file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and offers exactly the 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 could disable the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.