Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about shielding 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 Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very helpful tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to revisit the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional way to deny direct linking to files, you could use an exceptionally simple tool, which we've included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you will only need to pick the Internet site that should be protected and our system shall do the rest. Moreover, you can determine whether the .htaccess file will be generated straight inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire site. Disabling it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.