Hotlinking, which is often referred to as bandwidth theft also, refers to linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another person could also build a website and as opposed to using their own images, they could put links straight to your images. Even though this may not be such a serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it shall be something quite serious if the images are copyrighted, because someone can be aiming to copy your website and trick people. If your hosting package 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 site. This is why you need to consider preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other types of files are linked too.
Hotlinking Protection in Website Hosting
There's a simple way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file within the website’s root directory, but if you are not very tech-savvy, we also give you a very intuitive tool that will permit you to activate the protection with a few clicks and without inputting any code. The tool could be accessed via the Hepsia Control Panel, which comes with all our website hosting plans and the only 2 things that you'll have to pick are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection has to be activated for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system will do the rest, so you will not need to do anything else manually on your end. If you wish to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you will just have to revisit exactly the same section, to mark the checkbox at the side of it and to click on the Delete button.