Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It will 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 website hosting account that you use, since all our website hosting service come with a very simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it has the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this function only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than generating an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you'll simply have to pick the site which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose if the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight within the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as fast - you will simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.