Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not take more than several mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature that we offer you even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, because all our Linux cloud plans come with a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same exact easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this service only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you can easily switch on the hotlink security function, that is provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply need to pick the site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can decide if the .htaccess file needs to be generated straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will only have to mark the checkbox next to the specific site and to click on the Delete button.