Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not require more than a number of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature we provide even if this is the 1st website hosting account which you use, since all our Linux shared hosting come with a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this feature only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you can easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature we offer you. While the common method of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you will only have to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You are able to turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.