Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else could also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security function we offer even if this is the 1st website hosting account that you use, as all our Linux shared hosting packages feature a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the very same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to activate this function only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool that we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You will only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to enable the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the feature is as easy - go back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the particular website and then press the Delete button.