Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not require more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink security feature which we offer even if this is the 1st website hosting account which you use, since all our shared plans include a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this feature only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with several clicks. The standard way for you to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a few directives in it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to pick the website which you need to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the needed content inside it. You can also use this option for only one folder instead of the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you may deactivate it with just one click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.