Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person can also build a site and as opposed to 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 Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting real site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing 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 provide a very user-friendly tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux shared web hosting and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you start a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that another person is linking to your files without your consent, you may easily cut them off by activating the hotlink protection function which we provide. While the regular method of doing that is to generate an .htaccess file, we have got a special tool which can execute this automatically and you will only need to pick the site in question and to determine whether our system should generate the necessary file inside the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is an element of our custom made Hepsia Control Panel and features the exact same user-friendly interface, so you'll be able to use it without any difficulties even if you have never used any hosting service before. You can disable the hotlink protection feature for any website/folder with a mouse click from the exact same section.