Hotlinking, which is sometimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person can also build a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone can be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very intuitive tool that will permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our website hosting service and the only 2 things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection has to be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll simply have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you open a semi-dedicated server account and you learn that somebody is linking to your files without your approval, you will be able to easily cut them off by enabling the hotlink security function which we provide. While the common way to do that is to set up an .htaccess file, we've got a special tool that can execute this automatically and you'll only need to pick the website in question and to decide whether our system should set up the necessary file in the primary folder or within a subfolder. The tool is a component of our custom Hepsia Control Panel and provides exactly the same user-friendly interface, so you will be able to use it without complications even if you have never used any web hosting service before. You may switch off the hotlink security feature for any website/folder with a click through the same section.