Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
It shall not require more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we offer even if this is the very first hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all our Linux website hosting services include a very simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this service only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to 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 somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature which we offer. While the regular technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you will only need to pick the site in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file within the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even if you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click from the exact same section.