Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
It will not require more than a number of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security function that we offer you even if this is the first hosting account you use, as all our cloud hosting include a quite 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 exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to activate this function only for a specific website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function which we offer you. While the standard way to do this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily do this automatically and you will only need to choose the site in question and to decide whether our system should create the necessary file in the main folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and offers exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even when you have never used any hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the same section.