Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also build a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While 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 somebody can be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
It won't take more than a few mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature that we offer you even if this is the very first web hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all of our cloud plans come with a simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the exact same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply need to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this feature only for a specific site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.