Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else could also develop a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. While this might not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
There's a simple way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore give you a very intuitive tool that will permit you to enable the protection with several mouse clicks and without writing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux cloud website hosting and the only two things that you will have to choose 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 need to do anything else manually on your end. If you want to deactivate the hotlink protection option at some point, you'll only have to revisit the exact same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.