Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also develop a website and rather than 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 site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
It shall not take more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink security feature that we offer even if this is the 1st website hosting account that you use, as all of our Linux hosting feature a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same exact intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this function only for a particular Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only have to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. If needed, you'll also have the option to activate the feature only for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally simple - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the specific website and then press the Delete button.