Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

It shall not take more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature we offer you even if this is the 1st web hosting account which you use, because all our cloud website hosting plans include a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the exact same intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet 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 pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the security tool we've designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site instead of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and select the domain or subdomain your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is just as easy - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the specific site and then press the Delete button.