Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux hosting plans and the only two things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at some point, you will just have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you discover that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by switching on the hotlink security function that we offer you. While the typical method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can easily execute this automatically and you'll only need to choose the website in question and to decide whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it with no difficulties even if you have never used any hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink protection function for any website/folder with a mouse click through the exact same section.