Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another website. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual could also create a site and rather than using their own images, they can put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be attempting to copy your Internet site and deceive people. If your web hosting package deal has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting

There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our shared web hosting and the only 2 things that you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't need to do anything else personally on your end. If you want to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.