Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, describes linking to images which are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have an Internet site with some images on it, another individual can also develop a site and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. While this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, as somebody can be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you might exhaust your resources without getting legitimate visitors, due to the fact that the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about protecting your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Shared Website Hosting
It won't require more than a number of clicks to activate the hotlink security function we offer you even if this is the 1st website hosting account which you use, due to the fact that all our shared website hosting plans include a simple and user-friendly tool that will permit you to stop direct links to your content. The tool is an element of our innovative Hepsia CP, so it provides the very same easy-to-use point & click interface. When you log in to your account’s back office and navigate to the Hotlink Protection section, you'll simply have to choose the domain or subdomain you want to protect from a drop-down list. If you wish to enable this feature only for a particular site folder, you've got the option to do that. All sites with enabled hotlink protection shall appear inside this section and you will be able to disable the service by selecting the checkbox beside the given website and pressing the Delete button.