Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also build a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

It will not require more than a couple of clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function which we offer you even if this is the first website hosting account you use, as all our shared web hosting plans feature a rather simple and user-friendly tool that will enable you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it has the very same intuitive point-and-click interface. Once you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect from a drop-down list. If you want to enable this service only for a certain Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you can deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.