Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody may be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It will not require more than several clicks to enable the hotlink security feature which we offer even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, due to the fact that all of our Linux hosting come with a very simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it has the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this function only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security function which we offer. While the common way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that is able to do this automatically and you will only have to choose the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the required file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even if you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click from the same section.