Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft as well, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, somebody else can also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have one small personal Internet site, it can be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will exhaust your resources without getting real visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other website. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Hosting
There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images by using an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very helpful tool that will allow you to activate the protection with a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool may be accessed through the Hepsia CP, provided with all our shared hosting and the only two things that you'll have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if 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 personally on your end. If you wish to deactivate the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll only have to return to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to press the Delete button.