Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It won't take more than a few mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection function that we offer even if this is the first website hosting account that you use, because all of our Linux cloud web hosting packages include a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's supplied with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of generating an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use an incredibly simple tool, which we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only have to pick the site that needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file will be set up straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will only need to mark the checkbox next to the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.