Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers

If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink security feature we provide. While the typical technique of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can perform this automatically and you will only need to pick the Internet site in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file within the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and has exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no difficulties even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.