Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It shall not take more than a number of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security feature which we offer you even if this is the very first website hosting account you use, since all of our website hosting include a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the exact same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this function only for a particular Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you will be able to turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and pressing the Delete button.