Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be aiming to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux web hosting and the only two things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
Our company offers an uncomplicated solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't very tech-savvy, you'll be able to benefit from it with a few mouse clicks. The usual way for you to enable server-side hotlink security is to generate an .htaccess file and to add a couple of directives within it. With the tool which you'll find in the Hepsia CP, which comes with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to choose the site which you would like to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content within it. You can even use this option for only one folder rather than the whole website - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file has to be set up. If you no longer want the hotlink security to be enabled, you'll be able to disable it with a single mouse click via the very same section of your CP.