Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual may also create a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our website hosting plans and the only two things which you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you will only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
Our company offers an effective solution to secure your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with a few clicks. The common technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a number of directives within it. With the tool which you'll find in the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to pick the Internet site that you want to protect and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the necessary content inside it. You can also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the entire website - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer need the hotlink protection to be switched on, you could disable it with one mouse click via the same exact section of your Control Panel.