Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person may also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not require more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the 1st hosting account you use, due to the fact that all of our cloud hosting plans come with a quite 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 innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your consent, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature we offer you. While the common way to do this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you'll only need to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any complications even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.