Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual could also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared web hosting packages and the only two things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function we offer you. While the typical method of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we have a special tool that can easily execute this automatically and you shall only have to select the website in question and to choose whether our system should create the needed file in the primary folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia CP and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without issues even when you have never used any hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click from the same section.