Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It won't take more than several mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security feature we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account that you use, since all our cloud hosting include a simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it features the same easy-to-use point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this feature only for a particular 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 will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You will only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the Control Panel and pick the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box next to the specific website and then press the Delete button.