Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also create a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That 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 also.

Hotlinking Protection in Hosting

It shall not take more than a few clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature we provide even if this is the first hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all our Linux hosting plans feature a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this service only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside 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 somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - return to the same section, check the box next to the particular website and then press the Delete button.