Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone could be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
As our Linux website hosting feature a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally just a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool comes with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and when you open it, you will just have to choose the domain or subdomain which you want to protect. Additionally, you may also select if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You won't need to do anything else, due to the fact that our system will create an .htaccess file automatically within the preferred location and will add the required code in it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection will be listed inside the very same section, so you could disable this service for each of them with a click.