Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web 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 are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our shared web hosting service and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you create a semi-dedicated server account and you find out that somebody is linking to your files without your authorization, you could easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function that we offer. While the regular way to do this is to generate an .htaccess file, we have a special tool which can do this automatically and you will only need to pick the website in question and to choose whether our system should generate the needed file inside the primary folder or inside a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and provides the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without complications even when you have never used any website hosting service before. You may deactivate the hotlink security function for any website/folder with a click through exactly the same section.