Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person may also create a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting real site 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 just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting

It shall not take more than several clicks to enable the hotlink security feature we provide even if this is the first hosting account that you use, since all of our cloud web hosting include a quite 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 offers the same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to select the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this feature only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear within this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

We offer a simple solution to protect your content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you are able to take full advantage of it with just a few clicks. The usual way to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to create 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 have to choose the website that you intend to protect and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the essential content in it. You could also use this option for just one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be active, you can deactivate it with one mouse click through the same exact section of your Control Panel.