Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
It will not take more than a number of clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature we offer you even if this is the 1st web hosting account you use, since all our shared web hosting come with a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the very same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink protection feature that we offer you. While the regular technique of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can easily perform this automatically and you'll only have to select the site in question and to decide whether our system should create the required file within the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom made Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without difficulties even when you have never used any hosting service before. You'll be able to deactivate the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.