Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
It will not require more than a couple of clicks to enable the hotlink security feature that we offer even if this is the 1st hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all of our cloud hosting plans include a quite simple and easy-to-use 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 same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this service only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide a simple solution to shield your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you are able to benefit from it with several mouse clicks. The conventional way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia CP, supplied with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to select the site which you intend to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all the necessary content inside it. You can even use this function for just one folder as opposed to the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you can deactivate it with one mouse click via the exact same section of your Control Panel.