Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
It shall not take more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature which we offer you even if this is the first website hosting account that you use, because all our Linux website hosting come with a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the very same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this function only for a certain website folder, you've got the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you switch on this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party Internet site in place of your actual images. You will only need to navigate to the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to switch on the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the function is equally effortless - go back to the exact same section, check the box next to the given website and then press the Delete button.