Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It won't require more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection function which we provide even if this is the first website hosting account you use, since all our Linux shared hosting packages include a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this service only for a particular Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

Our company offers an effective solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a few clicks. The usual way to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the site which you need to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the necessary content within it. You could also use this option for just one folder instead of the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you may deactivate it with just one click through the same exact section of your Control Panel.