Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another person can also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about preserving 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 Web Hosting

It won't take more than a few mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature we offer you even if this is the very first web hosting account that you use, as all of our shared web hosting plans include a very simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this feature only for a particular website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can turn off 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 open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function that we offer. While the standard technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you shall only need to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.