Hotlinking, which is oftentimes referred to as bandwidth theft too, refers to linking to images that are on another Internet site. In simple terms, 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. While this might not be such a major issue if you have a smaller personal Internet site, it will be something very serious if the images are copyrighted, because somebody might be aiming to copy your website and cheat people. If your hosting package deal has a restricted monthly bandwidth quota, you will run out of resources without getting legitimate visitors, as the traffic shall be consumed by the other site. This is why you need to think about preserving your content from being hotlinked - not only images, but also files, since in rare occasions other sorts of files are linked also.