Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another person can also build a site and rather than 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 a small personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
There is a way to avoid the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed via the Hepsia CP, provided with all our Linux cloud web hosting and the only two things that you will need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection needs to be activated for the main Internet 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 decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you notice that someone has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the security tool we've designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting Control Panel. As soon as you activate this option, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party website in place of your actual images. You'll only have to visit the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain that your Internet site uses from a convenient drop-down menu - it's as elementary as that. If needed, you will also have the option to activate the feature for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the feature is equally easy - go back to the very same section, check the box alongside the given website and then press the Delete button.