Hotlinking, which is often called bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual may also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting

It shall not require more than a couple of clicks to activate the hotlink protection function which we provide even if this is the very first hosting account you use, due to the fact that all of our shared plans feature a simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it has the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose 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 particular site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with active hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.