Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else may also build a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not take more than several clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature we offer you even if this is the very first hosting account which you use, because all of our Linux cloud hosting feature a very simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it features the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this feature only for a certain website folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily deactivate 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 us and you find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your real images. You'll only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If required, you shall also have the option to enable the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is equally easy - go back to the exact same section, check the box beside the specific site and then press the Delete button.