Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft as well, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also develop a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, since someone might be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is the reason why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting
You can easily shield your content if you generate an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you need to use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is included with all cloud website hosting packages that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be enabled in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then select if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or in a subfolder and you will be all set. You do not need any programming capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, as there shall be nothing else to do. If you would like to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all of the sites which are protected within the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.