Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another person may also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting

It shall not require more than a number of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature that we offer you even if this is the very first website hosting account which you use, as all of our web hosting plans come with a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it offers the exact same intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this feature only for a specific website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the security tool that we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your real images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the very same section, check the box next to the specific website and then click on the Delete button.