Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also build a website and as opposed to 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 smaller personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone may be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our hosting packages and the only 2 things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that someone is linking to your files without your permission, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security feature that we offer you. While the standard technique of doing that is to set up an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you'll simply have to pick the Internet site in question and to determine whether our system should create the needed file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is part of our customized Hepsia Control Panel and has the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no complications even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You may turn off the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a click from exactly the same section.