Hotlinking, which is often called 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, another person can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It won't require more than several clicks to activate the hotlink security feature we offer even if this is the 1st website hosting account that you use, because all of our Linux shared hosting feature a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in 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
We provide an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The conventional way to enable server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll discover within the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to choose the website which you want to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content within it. You could also use this function for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be active, you can deactivate it with just one click via the very same section of your Control Panel.