Hotlinking Protection
What's hotlink protection and exactly how does it work? When do you really need it?
Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a big problem if you have a smaller personal website, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be attempting to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll run out of resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Web Hosting
There's a simple way to avoid the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also offer a very helpful tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, offered with all our shared web hosting and the only two things that you'll have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you'll only have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.
