Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else could also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not require more than a number of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security feature that we provide even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, because all our Linux cloud hosting include a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it has the exact same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this service only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a couple of mouse clicks. The standard way for you to activate server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool that you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to choose the website which you need to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content within it. You could also use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be switched on, you could disable it with one click from the same section of your CP.