Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not take more than a number of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection function we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account you use, because all of our shared hosting feature a 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 advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this service only for a specific Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you may easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security feature we provide. While the common technique of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can do this automatically and you will only have to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any complications even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the same section.