Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It will not take more than several clicks to activate the hotlink security feature which we provide even if this is the first website hosting account which you use, because all of our web hosting include a very simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this service only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we've created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as basic as that. When necessary, you'll also have the option to enable the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the protection is equally effortless - return to the very same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.