Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person can also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux website hosting packages and the only two things which you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide an uncomplicated solution to shield your content and even if you are not very tech-savvy, you could take full advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The conventional way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives inside it. With the tool which you'll find inside the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only have to pick the site that you would like to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the needed content in it. You can even use this option for only one folder rather than the whole Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be created. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you may disable it with just one click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.