Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
It won't require more than a few mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the 1st web hosting account which you use, since all our Linux cloud web hosting packages come with a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this function only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide you with an effective solution to shield your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a few clicks. The usual approach to activate server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool that you'll find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to choose the site which you would like to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the required content inside it. You may also use this feature for just one folder instead of the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be switched on, you may disable it with one mouse click via the same section of your CP.