Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, 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 documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

It shall not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security function which we provide even if this is the very first website hosting account which you use, because all our Linux shared web hosting services come with a simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this service only for a certain site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you don't want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you will simply have to pick the website that has to be secured and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can determine if the .htaccess file needs to be set up directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you want to switch on the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll only have to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.