Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It will not take more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature which we provide even if this is the very first web hosting account you use, because all our cloud web hosting feature a simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the same intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this feature only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

Our company offers an effective solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you'll be able to take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The usual approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to create an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll discover in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the website which you intend to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the essential content in it. You can even use this function for just one folder rather than the whole site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be enabled, you can deactivate it with just one click via the same section of your Control Panel.