Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also build a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be aiming to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not take more than several clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature which we offer even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, since all of our cloud hosting include a simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it offers the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as simple as that. If needed, you will also have the option to enable the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is as effortless - get back to the very same section, check the box beside the specific site and then press the Delete button.