Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone may be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, offered with all our Linux shared hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file by hand within the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you can use an exceedingly simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply have to choose the website that has to be protected and our system shall do the rest. Also, you can decide whether the .htaccess file will be set up directly within the root folder or in a subfolder, when you'd like to activate the hotlink security feature only for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as simple - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the particular Internet site and to click on the Delete button.