Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it can be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody could be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you may use up all your resources without getting real website visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you should consider preserving 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 Hosting
There's a way of avoiding the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also offer a very easy-to-use tool that shall permit you to activate the protection with just a few clicks and without typing any code. The tool could be accessed through the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our Linux 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 needs to be enabled for the main website folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else personally on your end. If you decide to disable the hotlink protection option eventually, you will just need to go back to the exact same section, to mark the checkbox next to it and to click on the Delete button.