Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It won't take more than a couple of mouse clicks to enable the hotlink protection feature that we offer you even if this is the first web hosting account you use, as all of our Linux shared website hosting come with a quite simple and easy to work with tool that will permit you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our revolutionary Hepsia Control Panel, so it provides the same exact easy-to-use point-and-click interface. After you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will simply need to choose the domain or subdomain that you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you'd like to switch on this feature only for a particular website folder, you've got the option to do that. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you can easily turn off the service by selecting the checkbox alongside the given website and pressing the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your consent, you may easily switch on the hotlink security feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server packages. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the conventional approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you will only need to choose the site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Also, you can decide whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly inside the root folder or within a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you'll only have to mark the checkbox alongside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.