Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual could also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It won't take more than a number of mouse clicks to switch on the hotlink protection function that we offer even if this is the very first hosting account which you use, because all our shared website hosting plans include a quite simple and easy-to-use tool that will allow you to prevent direct links to your content. The tool is a component of our advanced Hepsia CP, so it offers the exact same intuitive point-and-click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and go to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain that you'd like to secure from a drop-down list. If you would like to switch on this function only for a particular website folder, you will have the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will appear inside this section and you could turn off the service by selecting the checkbox next to the given website and clicking on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you don't want other people to use your images on their sites without your approval, you may easily activate the hotlink security function, that is available with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of setting up an .htaccess file manually within the site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you could use a very simple tool, that we have included in the Hepsia CP. From it, you will simply need to select the site which has to be protected and our system will do the rest. Additionally, you can choose if the .htaccess file should be generated directly in the root folder or within a subfolder, when you'd like to activate the hotlink protection feature just for some content and not for the entire website. Deactivating it is just as easy - you will simply need to mark the checkbox alongside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.