Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a website and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be attempting to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a method for preventing 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 additionally offer a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our cloud hosting and the only two things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their Internet sites without your permission, you could easily enable the hotlink protection feature, which is available with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the Internet site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. Using it, you'll simply have to pick the Internet site that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file will be created directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to switch on the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the entire website. Stopping it is just as easy - you'll only need to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.