Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone might be aiming to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
It shall not take more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink security feature that we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account which you use, since all of our shared hosting include a rather simple and easy to work with tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it provides the same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this feature only for a specific site folder, you will have the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you could deactivate the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you could easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's available with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you may use an exceedingly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you will simply have to pick the website which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file needs to be created straight within the root folder or within a subfolder, when you want to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as simple - you'll only have to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.