Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security function which we offer you even if this is the first website hosting account which you use, because all our Linux shared website hosting packages come with a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this function only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file manually in the Internet site folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply have to pick the website which should be secured and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you'd like to switch on the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Disabling it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.