Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another person can also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody could be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
Due to the fact that our Linux shared website hosting packages come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you will be able to defend your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than two mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You shall not have to do anything else, due to the fact that our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and will include the necessary code within it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed within the very same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you may easily enable the hotlink security feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file by hand in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. With it, you will only have to select the Internet site which should be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to enable the hotlink security function only for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply need to mark the checkbox beside the specific Internet site and to click on the Delete button.