Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another person may also create a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

It will not take more than a few mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature we offer you even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, because all of our shared website hosting include a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it provides the exact same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you could disable 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 notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your real images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you will also have the option to enable the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the feature is equally effortless - go back to the same section, check the box beside the given site and then click on the Delete button.