Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also create a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
It won't require more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function we offer you even if this is the first website hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all our cloud website hosting plans include a quite simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this feature only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we provide. While the typical method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the site in question and to choose whether our system should set up the needed file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You'll be able to disable the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.