Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual can also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should think about shielding 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 Website Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared website hosting service and the only 2 things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll simply have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that someone is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we offer you. While the conventional way to do that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you will only need to select the site in question and to decide whether our system should generate the needed file in the main folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it with no problems even if you have never used any website hosting service before. You may disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.