Hotlinking is an expression that refers to the inclusion of images on a particular website via direct links. When you have site A, for instance, and someone creates website B and wishes to include a number of images from your Internet site, they're able to either save the images and then add them on their site or they can simply place links on their site to the images on yours. Subsequently, every time a visitor opens site B, site B will steal traffic from your own website A, as the images will load from your website hosting account. This technique is usually used for documents and other sorts of files as well. If you want to prevent 3rd parties from stealing your content and from using your own hosting account’s resources, you'll be able to limit their ability to use direct links to your files on their websites.