Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another person could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it will be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone might be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very time and effort saving tool that shall permit you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our shared website hosting and the only two things which you'll need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have to come back to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.