Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else could also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal website, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
You can easily secure your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case that you don't have previous experience, you could use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all shared hosting packages which we offer and can be accessed via the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be enabled in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or inside a subfolder and you shall be all set. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you wish to turn off the protection eventually, you will be able to see all of the websites that are protected inside the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button alongside each one of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want others to use your images on their Internet sites without your consent, you could easily activate the hotlink protection feature, which is supplied with all semi-dedicated server plans. Instead of creating an .htaccess file manually within the Internet site folder and writing some code in it, which is the common approach to deny direct linking to files, you can use a really simple tool, that we have incorporated into the Hepsia CP. From it, you'll simply need to choose the Internet site which needs to be secured and our system will do the rest. Furthermore, you can determine whether the .htaccess file should be set up directly in the root folder or in a subfolder, if you want to activate the hotlink protection feature only for some content and not for the entire Internet site. Disabling it is just as easy - you will only have to mark the checkbox next to the specific website and to click on the Delete button.