Hotlinking, which is oftentimes called bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images which are on another website. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, another person may also develop a website and rather than using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this may not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it can be something really serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody could be trying to copy your website and cheat people. If your web hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you can use up all your resources without getting legitimate visitors, simply 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 files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.
Hotlinking Protection in Cloud Hosting
There's a way of preventing the hotlinking of your images via an .htaccess file in the website’s root directory, but if you aren't very tech-savvy, we also give you a very intuitive tool that will allow you to enable the protection with several clicks and without typing any code. The tool can be accessed from the Hepsia Control Panel, provided with all our cloud hosting and the only 2 things that you will need to select are a domain/subdomain from a drop-down menu and whether the protection must be enabled for the main site folder or for some subfolder. Our system shall do the rest, so you will not have to do anything else by hand on your end. If you choose to turn off the hotlink protection option sometime, you'll simply have to go back to the same section, to mark the checkbox beside it and to click on the Delete button.