Hotlinking, which is sometimes termed bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a website with some images on it, someone else may also create a site and instead of using their own images, they could put links directly to your images. Even though this might not be such a major issue if you have a small personal Internet site, it'll be something rather serious if the images are copyrighted, since somebody may be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your hosting plan 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. That is why you need to think about shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, as in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked too.