Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else may also create a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your website hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting real site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very easy-to-use tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our web hosting and the only 2 things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll just have to return to the exact 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 another person has hotlinked any of your images, you should use the protection tool which we have developed and incorporated into our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. When you switch on this function, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website rather than your real images. You will only have to check out the Hotlink Protection section within the CP and choose the domain or subdomain your site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it is as elementary as that. If needed, you shall also have the option to enable the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in its entirety. Deactivating the feature is just as effortless - return to exactly the same section, check the box alongside the given Internet site and then click on the Delete button.