Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft as well, identifies linking to images which are on another site. Simply, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, some other person may also build a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody can be aiming to copy your Internet site and trick people. If your web hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting legitimate website visitors, simply because the traffic shall be consumed by the other Internet site. This is the reason why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also files, as in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Hosting
There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images through an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we additionally provide a very easy-to-work-with tool that will allow you to enable the protection with just a few mouse clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our hosting plans and the only 2 things which you will have to choose are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and if the protection must be enabled for the main Internet site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you won't have to do anything else personally on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option at one point, you will just need to return to the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to press the Delete button.