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

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It will not take more than several mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we offer even if this is the 1st website hosting account you use, since all our website hosting come with a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need 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 website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your approval, you may easily switch on the hotlink security function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only have to choose the Internet site that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file will be generated directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as fast - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.