Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
It shall not require more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature which we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, because all of our web hosting come with a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this function only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website 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 permission, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection function we offer you. While the standard technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can easily do this automatically and you'll simply have to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should create the required file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even when you have never used any hosting service before. You can switch off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from exactly the same section.