Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody may be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It won't require more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection function which we offer even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all of our shared hosting include a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this function only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We offer an uncomplicated solution to secure your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The standard technique to enable server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives within it. With the tool which you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply need to pick the Internet site that you want to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the needed content within it. You can also use this function for only one folder as opposed to the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be enabled, you may disable it with one click via the same section of your Control Panel.