Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal website, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Since our shared plans include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party sites with literally only two clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this type of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll just need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Furthermore, you could also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You shall not need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and will add the necessary code within it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the same section, so you may disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want others to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you can easily activate the hotlink protection function, which is available with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply need to select the website that needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Also, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be generated directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you would like to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole site. Disabling it is just as easy - you will only have to mark the checkbox beside the respective website and to click on the Delete button.