Hotlinking, which is often termed bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images that are on another website. In simple terms, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person could also create a website and rather than using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody might be attempting to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
Since our Linux shared hosting packages provide a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you shall be able to secure your content from appearing on third-party Internet sites with literally no more than two clicks, even if you do not have much experience with this type of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and as soon as you open it, you will only need to choose the domain or subdomain that you would like to protect. In addition, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You will not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically within the desired location and will include the necessary code inside it. All Internet websites with active hotlink protection shall be listed within the same section, so you can disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.