Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It won't take more than several mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function that we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account you use, because all our cloud hosting feature 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 advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the exact same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this feature only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer. While the standard technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you will only have to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should create the necessary file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia CP and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any issues even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You are able to switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.