Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person can also create a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be trying to copy your site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
There's a simple method for preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very intuitive tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed through the Hepsia CP, offered with all our Linux shared website hosting packages and the only two things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else by hand on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just need to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.