Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
It shall not require more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink protection function which we provide even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, because all of our cloud service include a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the same easy-to-use point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this service only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to 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 find out that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site as a substitute for your actual images. You'll only need to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain that your website uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as easy as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is as simple - go back to the exact same section, check the box alongside the particular site and then click on the Delete button.