Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
Since our shared website hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally only a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll only need to select the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. Optionally, you could also pick if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and shall add the required code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the very same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want others to use your images on their sites without your consent, you could easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, which is provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you may use a really simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will simply have to select the website which has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be set up directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you'd like to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the whole website. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective site and to click on the Delete button.