Hotlinking, which is oftentimes labeled bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images which are on another website. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else could also create a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone may be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may run out of resources without getting real website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
Because our Linux website hosting services come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to protect your content from appearing on third-party websites with literally only 2 mouse clicks, even if you don't have very much experience with such matters. The tool is available in the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll only have to select the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Optionally, you may also pick if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or only for a subfolder. You'll not need to do anything else, because our system shall create an .htaccess file automatically inside the desired location and shall add the needed code in it. All websites with active hotlink protection will be listed in the same section, so you can easily disable this service for each of them with just a mouse click.