Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud website hosting and the only 2 things which you will 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 will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide you with an uncomplicated solution to shield your whole content and even if you aren't quite tech-savvy, you can take advantage of it with a couple of clicks. The common approach to turn on server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a few directives within it. With the tool that you will find in the Hepsia CP, offered with all of the semi-dedicated server accounts, you'll only need to pick the Internet site which you need to secure and our system shall create the .htaccess file for you, including all of the essential content within it. You may also use this option for only one folder as opposed to the whole site - you just need to specify where the .htaccess file needs to be created. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be enabled, you'll be able to deactivate it with just one mouse click from the exact same section of your Control Panel.