Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It shall not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection function we offer you even if this is the very first web hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all our Linux shared website hosting include a simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it provides the exact same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with active hotlink protection will appear within 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 notice that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you activate this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to enable the feature only for a particular subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is as effortless - return to the same section, check the box beside the specific site and then click on the Delete button.