Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all our shared hosting include a quite simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this function only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you will be able to 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 do not want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only have to select the Internet site which should be secured and our system will do the rest. Moreover, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you want to switch on the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox next to the respective site and to click on the Delete button.