Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have a small personal site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, included with all our Linux shared website hosting packages and the only two things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to turn off the hotlink protection option eventually, you'll just have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.