Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be attempting to copy your site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There is a way to avoid 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 additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will allow you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our shared hosting plans and the only two things that you will need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just need to come back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we have created and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you enable this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website instead of your actual images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If required, you will also have the option to activate the function for a particular subfolder and not for the website altogether. Deactivating the function is just as easy - go back to the same section, check the box beside the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.