Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person could also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It shall not require more than a few clicks to activate the hotlink protection function which we offer even if this is the first website hosting account which you use, because all of our shared website hosting plans include a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it offers the same exact 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 need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to switch on this service only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you can turn off 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 discover that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you can use the protection tool that we have designed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you enable this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party site rather than your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section inside the CP and pick the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the feature for a particular subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - get back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the specific website and then click on the Delete button.