Hotlinking is when another website links directly to one or more of your images or multimedia files and includes it on their web page. Not only is this theft of your intellectual property, but further more, you are paying for the bandwidth used by that site. Which can result in a problem with your budget.<BR /><BR /> The most common way to prevent others from hotlinking your content is Apache's mod_rewrite. While this a solution that free available to use, there are a couple drawbacks. One being, that Apache has to be configured to use mod_rewrite (--enable-rewrite). Another one being, that for a lot of people writing regular expressions is not the most easiest thing to do.<BR /><BR /> Of course there are commercial solutions to the problem. Probably the most common one is cPanel. An administration interface for webserver, which let's you create all the necessary items for your hotlink protection with a matter of clicks, in a matter of seconds.