Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else can also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux website hosting and the only two things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard way to deny direct linking to files, you may use a very simple tool, that we've incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll simply have to choose the site which should be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file will be set up directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as fast - you'll only need to mark the checkbox next to the particular site and to click on the Delete button.