Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real 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 too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It shall not require more than a few mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security feature that we offer you even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, due to the fact that all of our shared hosting feature a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this feature only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the regular way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the website in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom made Hepsia CP and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You could switch off the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.