Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
It won't require more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink security function we offer you even if this is the first hosting account which you use, because all our Linux shared web hosting services include a simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the exact same easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you can easily enable the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Instead of creating an .htaccess file manually in the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we've included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply need to pick the Internet site which needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be created directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, if you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the respective website and to click on the Delete button.