Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be attempting to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
There is a method for 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 furthermore provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux web hosting services and the only 2 things which you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated 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 by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your authorization, you will be able to easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer you. While the standard technique of doing this is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool which can execute this automatically and you'll only need to select the Internet site in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file in the main folder or in a subfolder. The tool is an element of our customized Hepsia CP and offers the same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without problems even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You could deactivate the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.