Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
Due to the fact that our shared web hosting include a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you will be able to protect your content from displaying on third-party websites with literally only two clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with this sort of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just need to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not have to do anything else, because our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will include the required code within it. All websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed inside the very same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your permission, you could easily enable the hotlink security feature, that is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to setting up an .htaccess file manually in the site folder and writing some code inside it, which is the traditional way to deny direct linking to files, you can use an incredibly simple tool, that we have integrated into the Hepsia CP. Using it, you'll simply need to select the website that needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can make a decision if the .htaccess file should be created directly in the root folder or inside a subfolder, if you would like to enable the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the whole site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll only need to mark the checkbox beside the specific site and to click on the Delete button.