Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not take more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink security function we offer even if this is the very first hosting account which you use, since all of our cloud service come with a very simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the same exact 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 pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this function only for a particular website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature that we provide. While the regular technique of doing that is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you shall only need to choose the site in question and to determine whether our system should create the required file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and provides 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 may switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the same section.