Hotlinking, which is occasionally called bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. Basically, if you have a site with some images on it, another person may also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they may put links directly to your images. Although this may not be such a big problem if you have one small personal site, it'll be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody may be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your hosting plan has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could exhaust your resources without getting actual site visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other website. This is why you need to consider protecting your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also documents, because in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
You can easily protect your content if you create an .htaccess file inside the website’s root folder, but in case you don't have previous experience, you can use our hotlink protection tool. The latter is provided with all cloud hosting plans that we offer and could be accessed through the in-house built Hepsia Control Panel. The protection may be turned on in two easy steps - select the domain or subdomain for the Internet site in question, then pick if our system should create the .htaccess file in the main folder or within a subfolder and you will be good to go. You do not need any coding capabilities or any experience with this sort of matters, because there will be nothing else to do. If you want to turn off the protection eventually, you can see all the sites that are protected inside the exact same section of the CP with a Delete button next to each one of them.