Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else can also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have one small personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll exhaust your resources without getting real website visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Semi-dedicated Hosting
We provide an uncomplicated solution to secure your whole content and even if you aren't really tech-savvy, you can benefit from it with just a few mouse clicks. The usual approach to enable server-side hotlink protection is to generate an .htaccess file and to include a number of directives inside it. With the tool that you'll discover inside the Hepsia CP, offered with all semi-dedicated server accounts, you will only need to select the website which you intend to secure and our system will create the .htaccess file for you, including all the necessary content in it. You could also use this function for just one folder rather than the entire Internet site - you just have to specify where the .htaccess file should be set up. If you no longer require the hotlink protection to be switched on, you can deactivate it with a single click through the exact same section of your Control Panel.