Hotlinking, which is occasionally termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another site. In simple terms, if you have a website with some images on it, another individual can also create a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. While this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody could be trying to copy your site and trick people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you may exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, because in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked as well.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There is a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images by using 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 will allow you to enable the protection with a couple of mouse clicks and without entering any code. The tool may be accessed from the Hepsia CP, which comes with all our Linux cloud hosting and the only two things that you'll need to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection should be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else manually on your end. If you choose to disable the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.