Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be trying to copy your website and deceive people. If your hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
It shall not require more than several mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection feature that we offer even if this is the 1st hosting account you use, due to the fact that all of our Linux shared web hosting come with a rather simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it has the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. As soon as you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this feature only for a certain site folder, you will have the option to do that. All Internet sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear within this section and you can easily disable the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your approval, you can easily enable the hotlink protection function, that is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. Instead of creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you will only need to pick the Internet site that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file should be created straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire site. Stopping it is just as effortless - you will simply have to mark the checkbox alongside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.