Hotlinking, which is often labeled bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. In simple terms, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also build a website and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal site, it'll be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone may be aiming to copy your site and trick people. If your web hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting real site visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. That is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.

Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Website Hosting

There's a method for preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file inside the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very user-friendly tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with several clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed from the Hepsia CP, included with all our cloud website hosting and the only 2 things which you will have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you shall not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you will only have to come back to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.