Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It will not take more than a number of clicks to enable the hotlink security function we provide even if this is the first web hosting account you use, as all of our shared service include a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the exact same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to secure 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 Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can easily 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 discover that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the regular method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you will only need to select the site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the primary folder or within 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 with no issues even if you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.