Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person can also build a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody might be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
Due to the fact that our Linux cloud website hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from showing on third-party sites with literally no more than two mouse clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and once you open it, you'll just need to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. In addition, you can also choose if the hotlink protection shall be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically in the preferred location and shall add the needed code in it. All Internet websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the exact same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you do not want other people to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily switch on the hotlink protection function, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to creating an .htaccess file yourself inside the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the common way to deny direct linking to files, you can use a very simple tool, which we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll simply need to choose the site which has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be created directly inside the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you want to enable the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Deactivating it is just as fast - you'll simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.