How do I stop hotlinking?
Hotlinking is best described as the act of an outside source using your website content. This happens most often with media such as images. You may have created and hosted some type of media (image file for instance) on your website for use solely on your site. Another website owner may find the image and decide to use it. If the owner decides to simply add the picture into one of his website’s pages using your URL for the picture, this is hotlinking. This may also increase traffic for your website but not necessarily in a good way. Since hotlinking will load your files off of your web space to another person’s website, this increases your web traffic (which may result in overage charges for you if your web traffic is limited) and possibly puts more strain on your website while most of the time, the image (or media) used does not reference or give credit to yourself or your website. There are ways to restrict hotlinking so that your website files remain your own. Linux Hosting Packages
