Hotlinking, which is occasionally labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else may also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other website. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
As our Linux cloud hosting plans come with a simple and convenient hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than two mouse clicks, even if you do not have very much experience with such matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting CP and as soon as you open it, you will just need to select the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. In addition, you could also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, since our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will add the necessary code within it. All sites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed within the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a click.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Servers
If you do not want other individuals to use your images on their websites without your consent, you could easily enable the hotlink protection feature, that's provided with all semi-dedicated server plans. As an alternative to generating an .htaccess file yourself in the website folder and writing some code within it, which is the conventional method to deny direct linking to files, you may use an incredibly simple tool, which we have included in the Hepsia CP. Using it, you will only have to pick the site which needs to be protected and our system will do the rest. Optionally, you can decide whether the .htaccess file should be set up straight inside the root folder or in a subfolder, if you would like to activate the hotlink protection function just for some content and not for the entire site. Deactivating it is just as effortless - you'll only need to mark the checkbox beside the particular site and to click on the Delete button.