Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person may also create a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also provide a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared web hosting plans and the only two things that you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to disable the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to go back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to secure your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with several clicks. The usual way for you to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to set up an .htaccess file and to include a couple of directives in it. With the tool which you'll find within the Hepsia CP, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only have to choose the website that you would like to secure and our system will set up the .htaccess file for you, including all of the needed content inside it. You may also use this option for only one folder rather than the entire site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink security to be switched on, you could deactivate it with just one click through the very same section of your Control Panel.