Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another person could also create a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It shall not take more than a few mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security function which we offer even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, since all our website hosting services come with 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 revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this feature only for a certain Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear in this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We provide you with an effective solution to shield your entire content and even if you are not really tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The conventional way for you to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives within it. With the tool that you'll discover within the Hepsia CP, included with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the website which you would like to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the essential content within it. You can even use this function for only one folder as opposed to the whole website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you'll be able to deactivate it with a single mouse click from the same exact section of your Control Panel.