Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a website and instead of using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it can be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone can be trying to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
Because our cloud hosting come with a simple and handy hotlink protection tool, you'll be able to defend your content from showing on third-party websites with literally only a couple of mouse clicks, even if you don't have much experience with this kind of matters. The tool is included with the Hepsia hosting Control Panel and once you open it, you'll only need to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect. Furthermore, you may also choose if the hotlink protection will be active for the default domain root folder or just for a subfolder. You will not have to do anything else, as our system will create an .htaccess file automatically inside the preferred location and shall add the needed code inside it. All websites with enabled hotlink protection shall be listed inside the exact same section, so you can disable this service for any of them with a mouse click.