Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function that we offer even if this is the first hosting account that you use, because all of our Linux hosting plans include a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it features the same exact intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this service only for a particular website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of generating an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply have to select the website which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can decide if the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as simple - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.