Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

It won't take more than several mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security feature that we provide even if this is the very first hosting account you use, since all of our cloud website hosting plans come with a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it features the same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this feature only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

We provide an effective solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with just a few clicks. The conventional approach to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll simply have to choose the website that you want to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content within it. You can even use this option for only one folder rather than the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you can disable it with one mouse click via the exact same section of your CP.