Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else can also create a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be trying to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file inside 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 permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our website hosting plans and the only two things that you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that someone is linking to your files without your consent, you can easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink protection feature we provide. While the regular method of doing this is to create an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can execute this automatically and you shall only have to select the website in question and to determine whether our system should create the required file inside the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is part of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and features exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without difficulties even in case you have never used any web hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the exact same section.