Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone could be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting

It will not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security feature which we provide even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, since all of our cloud plans include a very simple and easy-to-use tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is part of our innovative Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the very same easy-to-use point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and visit the Hotlink Protection section, you will only need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this feature only for a certain website folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear in this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given site and clicking on the Delete button.