Yes. Do not allow hotlinking on your website.

Why?

Let’s tell you other names by which hotlinking goes, then perhaps you will know why. Hotlinking is also called direct linking, piggy-backing, offsite image grabs leeching, and bandwidth theft.

Got the idea?

All these terms stand for the attempt a webmaster makes to steal your bandwidth. Actually, what many webmasters do is this: he or she will use an image or any other object from your website in one or more article on his or her website just by adding a direct link to the image or object on your site or server, thus stealing your bandwidth.

How?

Well, let’s say, X has used a file called image.jpg in one of the articles on his website by providing a direct link to the file that is hosted on your server (). Now, when a visitor visits his website to read that article, his server sends a request to your server for image.jpg, whose URL is placed in that article, and thus the article on X’s website displays the image.

Suppose the size of image (image.jpg) is 20kb, so when one visitor read X’s article, you lose 20kb of bandwidth to X. If X gets just one visitor per month than there is nothing to worry, but what if he got 1000 daily visitors? You will lose 20,000kb (around 20mb) of bandwidth daily, and what if he has 100,000 visitors daily? You will lose 20,000,000kb (around 2gb) of bandwidth daily.

This is serious, isn’t it?

How to prevent Hotlinking?

Well, it is hard to prevent hotlinking to your resources, but you can try doing it by modifying .htaccess and writing mod-rewrite, if you are using Apache web server.

The .htaccess rule that you will set to prevent hotlinking will look like this:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?yoursite.com/.*$ [NC]

RewriteRule \.(pdf)$ – [F,NC]

Well, if you are thinking of hotlinking to others’ resources then wait for a day, tomorrow I will tell you why you should avoid hotlinking to other website.