Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also create a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone can be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It will not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection function which we offer even if this is the first website hosting account that you use, because all of our Linux website hosting come with a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to enable this function only for a specific Internet site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.