Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person may also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It shall not require more than several clicks to switch on the hotlink security function which we offer even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, since all our Linux shared website hosting packages feature a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it has the same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this feature only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide an effective solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The common technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to create an .htaccess file and to add a few directives within it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to pick the website which you intend to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content inside it. You can also use this function for only one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be switched on, you could deactivate it with a single click from the very same section of your CP.