Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone might be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we furthermore offer a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with a couple of clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our Linux shared website hosting packages and the only two things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with our company and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool we have designed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. Whenever you activate this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You'll only need to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the Control Panel and choose the domain or subdomain that your site uses from a practical drop-down menu - it's as simple as that. When necessary, you will also have the option to enable the function only for a specific subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is equally simple - return to the exact same section, check the box beside the given website and then press the Delete button.