Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a big problem if you have a small personal Internet site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be attempting to copy your site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting legitimate website visitors, because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.

Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting

There is a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we additionally offer a very user-friendly tool that will allow you to enable the protection with a few mouse clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our shared website hosting and the only two things which you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection needs to be enabled for the main Internet 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 disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will simply have to return to exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.