Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else could also build a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can run out of resources without getting real visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Due to the fact that our shared hosting plans feature a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to defend your content from showing on third-party websites with literally no more than 2 clicks, even if you do not have a lot of experience with this sort of matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting CP and when you open it, you'll only need to pick the domain or subdomain that you'd like to protect. Optionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection will be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and will add the necessary code within it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within exactly the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want others to use your images on their websites without your authorization, you may easily activate the hotlink protection function, which is offered with all semi-dedicated server package deals. As an alternative to creating an .htaccess file by hand inside the website folder and writing some code inside it, which is the standard approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we've integrated into the Hepsia CP. By using it, you'll only have to pick the Internet site which has to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Optionally, you can decide if the .htaccess file should be set up straight in the root folder or within a subfolder, in case you would like to switch on the hotlink security function just for some content and not for the whole site. Stopping it is just as easy - you'll simply have to mark the checkbox beside the respective Internet site and to click on the Delete button.