Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be attempting to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very intuitive tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our hosting and the only 2 things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to revisit 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 do not want other people to use your images on their Internet sites without your approval, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection function, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to generating an .htaccess file manually inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll simply need to select the website that has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can determine if the .htaccess file needs to be created straight within the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole website. Disabling it is just as fast - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.