Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It will not take more than a number of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security function we offer you even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, because all of our website hosting plans come with a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this function only for a particular website folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you can take full advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The conventional way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to choose the site which you intend to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content in it. You could also use this feature for just one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be switched on, you can deactivate it with one mouse click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.