Hotlinking, which is sometimes labeled bandwidth theft also, identifies linking to images that are on another site. Simply, if you have a site with some images on it, another person can also create a website and as opposed to using their own images, they can put links straight to your images. Although this may not be such a serious issue if you have one small personal website, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, due to the fact that somebody can be aiming to copy your site and deceive people. If your website hosting plan has a limited monthly bandwidth quota, you can exhaust your resources without getting actual website visitors, because the traffic will be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to consider shielding your content from being hotlinked - not simply images, but also documents, since in rare occasions other kinds of files are linked too.
