Hot Linking

I looked up one of my old posts recently and was surprised to see a somewhat offensive picture that simply said "Stop Hotlinking". I have to confess that I had no idea what this meant. So here is a quick tutorial:

Hot-linking is when someone uses a link to an image that is saved on another website instead of saving a copy of the image on the website that the picture will be shown on. For example, instead of saving picture.gif and loading it on to their own website, the person uses a link to the picture as http://website.com/picture.gif. Hot-linking uses the bandwidth of the person who owns the website where the picture is stored. This costs that person money.

In some cases website owners replace any hot-linked images with an offensive image to deter any other website owners from hot-linking.