Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also create a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
It won't require more than a few clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, because all our Linux shared web hosting include a simple and user-friendly tool that will permit 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. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this function only for a certain website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to protect your whole content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with just a few clicks. The standard way for you to enable server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll find in the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to pick the website which you need to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content inside it. You could also use this option for only one folder instead of the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be active, you'll be able to disable it with a single mouse click from the same section of your CP.