What is meant by Hotlink protection?

Hotlinking is the practice of linking directly to the files on another website that does not belong to you. It is also known as bandwidth theft because the hotlinked image or file is still being used on the other website's bandwidth. If you are doing this to someone else, it would probably be best if you stopped. You can do it without realizing it sometimes. If someone else is hotlinking to images on your website, you are going to suffer a loss of bandwidth. If you notice that your traffic quota is running low with your own hosting service, but have no idea where the extra bandwidth is going, you are probably being hotlinked, and would benefit from some hotlink protection.



Hotlink protection is the best way to avoid this and keep it from sucking up your precious bandwidth. The way it works is it checks all the requests made for files that you are hosting to see if they are coming from a different hosting server. If it is, then it will deny the request. It does this through the use of an .htaccess file. Hotlink protection is designed so that other websites can't make a call to your personal local image files.



Bandwidth is the name for the data being transferred to a computer from a particular website. A higher bandwidth means that more data can be transferred, which is what a "fast connection" refers to. The more requests going through a server at once, the lower the bandwidth is. So whenever someone hotlinks to an image on your site, there are going to be more requests going through, and your bandwidth will suffer as a result. It can also be likened to your neighbor plugging into one of your electrical sockets. He gets electricity while you are stuck paying for it.



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