Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
It shall not require more than a number of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature which we provide even if this is the 1st website hosting account which you use, since all our Linux website hosting include a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the 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'll only have to select the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this feature only for a certain website folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
Our company offers an effective solution to protect your content and even if you are not quite tech-savvy, you are able to take advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard way to activate server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a few directives inside it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to choose the website that you intend to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the necessary content inside it. You can also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with one mouse click via the same section of your Control Panel.