Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It shall not take more than several mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security function which we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all of our web hosting service feature a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it features the same intuitive point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this function only for a specific Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide you with an effective solution to secure your content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a few clicks. The conventional way to turn on server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover within the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to pick the site that you would like to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the required content within it. You could also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be enabled, you could disable it with just one mouse click from the same exact section of your Control Panel.