Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images that are on another site. Basically, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, someone else could also create a site and instead of using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this might not be such a serious issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you will use up all your resources without getting actual site visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Web Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but just in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is supplied with all cloud web hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed from the in-house built Hepsia CP. The protection may be activated in two basic steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then choose if our system should set up the .htaccess file inside the main folder or inside a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't require any coding expertise or any experience with this kind of matters, since there shall be nothing else to do. If you want to remove the protection at some time, you could see all the sites which are protected in the same exact section of the Control Panel with a Delete button next to each one of them.