Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person may also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal site, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody can be trying to copy your website and trick people. If your website hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Web Hosting
As our Linux web hosting include a simple and practical hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to shield your content from showing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you don't have a lot of experience with such matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you'll just need to pick the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Additionally, you can also pick if the hotlink protection shall be enabled for the default domain root folder or exclusively for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, as our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the needed location and shall include the required code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed in the same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with just a mouse click.