Hotlinking, which is occasionally referred to as bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another website. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else may also create a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we furthermore provide a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool may be accessed via the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting packages and the only two things which you will have to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be activated for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you decide to deactivate the hotlink protection option eventually, you will only have to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.