Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared hosting packages and the only 2 things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll just have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide a simple solution to shield your content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you'll be able to take full advantage of it with just a few mouse clicks. The standard technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you will find within the Hepsia Control Panel, supplied with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to choose the Internet site which you need to secure and our system shall set up the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content in it. You can even use this feature for only one folder rather than the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be active, you may deactivate it with a single click from the same section of your CP.