Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, some other person could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a small personal website, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone could be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very time and effort saving tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a few clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux shared packages and the only 2 things which you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at one point, you will only have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press 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 consent, you could easily activate the hotlink security feature, that's offered with all semi-dedicated server packages. As opposed to setting up an .htaccess file manually within the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the standard method to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia Control Panel. By using it, you will only have to choose the site that needs to be secured and our system shall do the rest. Furthermore, you can choose whether the .htaccess file needs to be created directly within the root folder or inside a subfolder, in case you'd like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the whole Internet site. Stopping it is just as easy - you will simply have to mark the checkbox next to the particular site and to click on the Delete button.