Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet 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. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone may be attempting to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature that we provide even if this is the 1st website hosting account that you use, since all our Linux shared web hosting include a quite simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same exact intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this function only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to secure your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with several clicks. The common approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to select the Internet site that you intend to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the necessary content in it. You may also use this option for just one folder instead of the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be enabled, you could disable it with one mouse click from the same section of your CP.