Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting real website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It won't require more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature we offer even if this is the first website hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all of our Linux shared hosting services come with a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this feature only for a particular website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide a simple solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with several mouse clicks. The conventional way to turn on 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 in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to pick the website which you want to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content in it. You can also use this function for only one folder rather than the entire site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be active, you could deactivate it with just one click via the very same section of your CP.