Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It won't take more than a number of clicks to enable the hotlink protection function that we offer you even if this is the very first website hosting account which you use, as all our shared hosting services come with a very simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it provides the very same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this service only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can 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 discover that another person is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function we offer. While the regular method of doing this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which is able to do this automatically and you will only need to pick the site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through exactly the same section.