Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It will not require more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink security function which we provide even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, as all of our website hosting come with a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it provides the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this feature only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file yourself within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will simply have to select the website that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file should be generated straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you want to enable the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the particular website and to click on the Delete button.