Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider shielding 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 Cloud Website Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud website hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be turned on in 2 basic steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or in a subfolder and you shall be ready. You do not need any programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection at some point, you will be able to see all the Internet sites that are protected within the same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your approval, you can easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Rather than generating an .htaccess file yourself inside the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceptionally simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. From it, you'll only have to choose the website which has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink security feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific website and to click on the Delete button.