Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a serious problem if you have a small personal website, it'll be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be attempting to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file in the website’s root folder, but in case you do not have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud hosting packages that we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection could be activated in 2 simple steps - choose the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be good to go. You don't require any programming skills or any experience with this sort of matters, due to the fact that there will be nothing else to do. If you wish to remove the protection eventually, you could see all the websites that are protected in the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
If you have a semi-dedicated server account with us and you find out that somebody has hotlinked any of your images, you may use the protection tool we've designed and included in our in-house built Hepsia hosting CP. Once you activate this feature, a server-generated image shall appear on the third-party Internet site as a substitute for your actual images. You will only have to go to the Hotlink Protection section in the CP and select the domain or subdomain which your Internet site uses from a handy drop-down menu - it is as basic as that. If necessary, you shall also have the option to activate the function just for a specific subfolder and not for the website in general. Deactivating the protection is just as effortless - go back to the same section, check the box alongside the specific Internet site and then click on the Delete button.