Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It won't require more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature we offer you even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, due to the fact that all our website hosting include 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 innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this function only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your permission, you can easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file manually inside the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply have to select the Internet site which needs to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be created straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, when you want to switch on the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the respective website and to click on the Delete button.