Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else may also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it will be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
As our shared hosting include a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to shield your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just need to pick the domain or subdomain that you want to protect. Optionally, you could also choose 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, since our system will create an .htaccess file automatically in the desired location and will add the needed code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can easily disable this service for any of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other people to use your images on their websites without your permission, you can easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you'll simply need to select the website which needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Additionally, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be set up straight in the root folder or inside a subfolder, when you'd like to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.