Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual could also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
It won't require more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection feature which we provide even if this is the first web hosting account that you use, since all of our Linux cloud hosting include a quite simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our revolutionary Hepsia CP, so it offers the same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to pick the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this feature only for a specific Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool that we have created and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. When you switch on this option, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site in place of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and choose the domain or subdomain which your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If necessary, you'll also have the option to activate the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the protection is just as easy - go back to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the particular website and then click on the Delete button.