Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection function that we provide even if this is the 1st website hosting account you use, because all of our cloud hosting come with a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the very same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this function only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an uncomplicated solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with several clicks. The conventional technique to activate server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a few directives inside it. With the tool which you will find in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site which you would like to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content within it. You can even use this feature for just one folder rather than the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could disable it with one mouse click via the same section of your Control Panel.