Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It won't require more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the first hosting account that you use, as all of our shared plans feature a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same exact intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this service only for a certain website folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with just a few mouse clicks. The common approach to enable server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives inside it. With the tool which you will find inside the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to select the website which you intend to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content inside it. You could also use this feature for only one folder rather than the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you may disable it with one mouse click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.