Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else may also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody might be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to enable the protection with a couple of clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud hosting and the only two things that you'll need to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll simply have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you discover that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool which we have developed and integrated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Whenever you enable this feature, a server-generated image will appear on the third-party site instead of your real images. You will only need to visit the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and pick the domain or subdomain your site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it's as easy as that. When necessary, you shall also have the option to switch on the function just for a particular subfolder and not for the website as a whole. Deactivating the function is just as effortless - go back to exactly the same section, check the box beside the specific website and then press the Delete button.