Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not take more than a few clicks to enable the hotlink security feature that we offer you even if this is the very first website hosting account that you use, because all our Linux shared hosting feature a very simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same intuitive point & click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to activate this feature only for a certain site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We offer a simple solution to protect your content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you could benefit from it with just a few clicks. The standard approach to activate server-side hotlink security is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives in it. With the tool that you will find inside the Hepsia CP, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to select the website that you want to protect and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content in it. You could also use this option for just one folder rather than the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you can disable it with just one click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.