Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also build a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate site visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
It won't require more than a couple of mouse clicks to activate the hotlink protection function that we offer you even if this is the very first hosting account that you use, because all of our Linux hosting include a simple and easy-to-use tool that will enable you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our advanced Hepsia Control Panel, so it features the exact same intuitive point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you will only have to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you wish to switch on this service only for a specific Internet site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other individuals to use your images on their sites without your approval, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server package deals. Rather than creating an .htaccess file by hand within the site folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. With it, you'll simply have to pick the site which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision whether the .htaccess file will be created directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to enable the hotlink protection function only for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as simple - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox beside the particular website and to click on the Delete button.