Hotlink Protection

Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual 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 issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It will not take more than several mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security function we offer you even if this is the very first hosting account you use, since all of our shared hosting plans include a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this service only for a particular Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given Internet site and clicking on the Delete button.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you find out that another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Once you activate this function, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If needed, you will also have the option to activate the feature just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then press the Delete button.