Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person may also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone could be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting

It won't require more than a few mouse clicks to activate the hotlink security feature which we provide even if this is the first hosting account you use, since all our Linux website hosting packages include a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the very same intuitive point & click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to enable this function only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you can easily deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given Internet site and pressing the Delete button.