Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It won't take more than a couple of clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function we provide even if this is the first hosting account which you use, since all our cloud web hosting packages feature a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it offers the very same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your permission, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of generating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only need to select the site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up straight inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.