Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It shall not 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 website hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all of our Linux shared website hosting plans come with a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it features the same exact 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 only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this function only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature which we provide. While the regular method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can do this automatically and you shall only need to select the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.