Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection function which we offer even if this is the 1st website hosting account which you use, as all of our shared hosting come with a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. After 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 want to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this feature only for a particular website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature which we offer. While the typical method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can perform this automatically and you'll only need to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should create the needed file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and provides the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without any difficulties even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You could disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.