Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something really 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 restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, included with all our Linux cloud website hosting packages and the only 2 things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just have to go back to exactly 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 don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your authorization, you may easily enable the hotlink security function, which is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file manually in the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll only need to select the website which has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll only need to mark the checkbox alongside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.