Hotlinking Protection

Hotlinking, which is sometimes called bandwidth theft too, identifies linking to images which are on another Internet site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, someone else can also develop a site and rather than using their own images, they may put links straight to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal site, it shall be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody may be trying to copy your Internet site and cheat people. If your website hosting package has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you could run out of resources without getting real site visitors, due to the fact that the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you should think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.