Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone can be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It will not take more than several clicks to enable the hotlink security feature which we offer you even if this is the first hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all our Linux web hosting come with a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this feature only for a certain site folder, you've got 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 next to the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will simply have to select the Internet site that has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be generated directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective website and to click on the Delete button.