Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another website. Essentially, if you have a website with some images on it, somebody else can also build a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a major issue if you have a small personal site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, as someone can be attempting to copy your site and trick people. If your hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting real visitors, as the traffic will be consumed by the other site. That is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you set up an .htaccess file within the website’s root folder, but if you don't have previous experience, you should use our hotlink protection tool. The latter comes with all website hosting package deals which we offer and can be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be activated in 2 simple steps - select the domain or subdomain for the website in question, then pick if our system should set up the .htaccess file in the primary folder or within a subfolder and you will be ready. You don't need any computer programming expertise or any experience with this type of matters, because there shall be nothing else to do. If you'd like to turn off the protection at some time, you can see all the sites that are protected inside the same exact section of the CP with a Delete button alongside each of them.