Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It shall not take more than a couple of clicks to switch on the hotlink security feature which we provide even if this is the 1st web hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all of our Linux cloud packages include a simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is part of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the same intuitive point & click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to select the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to activate this function only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with active hotlink protection shall appear in this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and pressing the Delete button.