Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It will not require more than several mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection function that we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all our cloud plans come with a very simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this feature only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The common technique to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll discover inside the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to pick the Internet site that you would like to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content within it. You can also use this option for just one folder rather than the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you can deactivate it with just one click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.