Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It won't take more than several clicks to activate the hotlink security function which we offer even if this is the first hosting account you use, since all our cloud web hosting plans feature a very simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this service only for a particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool which we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is equally simple - get back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then press the Delete button.