Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also create a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature that we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, since all our Linux web hosting include a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this feature only for a particular website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to protect your whole content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with several clicks. The usual approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool that you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to select the site which you intend to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content within it. You can even use this feature for just one folder rather than the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you may disable it with just one mouse click via the same section of your CP.