Hotlinking, which is oftentimes termed bandwidth theft also, describes linking to images that are on another Internet site. Essentially, if you have a site with some images on it, somebody else can 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 serious problem if you have a smaller personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that someone may be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your website hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, chances are you'll use up all your resources without getting actual visitors, simply because the traffic will be consumed by the other Internet site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not just images, but also files, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked also.
