Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not require more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink protection function we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account which you use, as all of our Linux shared hosting service include a simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same exact intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this function only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an effective solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a few mouse clicks. The conventional approach to activate server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll discover within the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to choose the Internet site that you need to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content in it. You could also use this function for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be enabled, you may deactivate it with one mouse click through the very same section of your CP.