Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another person could also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It will not require more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the very first hosting account which you use, as all our website hosting come with a very simple and user-friendly 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 features the same exact intuitive point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this function only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature we offer you. While the typical way to do that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can execute this automatically and you'll only need to select the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the required file within the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no complications even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You could turn off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.