Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person can also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It won't take more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security function that we offer even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, since all our shared website hosting include a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the very same easy-to-use 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 pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this feature only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide you with an effective solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The common approach to activate server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover inside the Hepsia CP, which comes with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to choose the website that you intend to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content within it. You can also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the whole Internet site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer need the hotlink security to be active, you may deactivate it with just one click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.