Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, some other person may also build a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be aiming to copy your website and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you should think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our cloud web hosting and the only 2 things that you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection should be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide you with an effective solution to protect your entire content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you could take advantage of it with just a few clicks. The conventional technique to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll discover in the Hepsia CP, provided with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will simply have to select the site that you would like to protect and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, adding all of the needed content inside it. You could also use this feature for only one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file has to be created. If you no longer want the hotlink protection to be active, you can disable it with just one click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.