Hotlinking

What is Hotlinking?

Bandwidth theft, also referred to as “hotlinking,” is the direct linking to another website’s file to make it appear on your own website, auction listing, blog, etc. It can be any type of file, image or video and it’s a major no-no!  I see this occur most often with banner exchanges and adding banners for topsites lists.

I found a great analogy for bandwidth theft on the altlab.com site’s article on hotlinking. They put it this way: “imagine a random stranger plugging into your electrical outlets, using your electricity without your consent, and you paying for it.” That wouldn’t be fun, now would it?

To understand bandwidth theft and its implications, it helps to understand what bandwidth is. Bandwidth basically refers to the amount of data transmitted from one point to another in a given amount of time. As you visit a website, you are using that site’s bandwidth to display all of its files. Many web hosts allot a certain amount of bandwidth to each client and they are charged for it accordingly. If a site is over their bandwidth, they will generally be charged for the extra data or they can be taken offline. Not all web hosts work this way, but many do, so it’s a real and serious issue.

Another issue with stealing bandwidth is the strain it puts on a website’s server. Just imagine how many websites might be hotlinking to one particular image. Might be 1, might be 10, might be 10,000! That is a lot of stolen bandwidth and a lot of strain on that server!

Hotlinking is also the culprit behind a lot of the dreaded Red X’s you see where images should be on websites. If you hotlink to an image and that website owner changes the image that was there, then you’re going to end up with a Red X. I hate when I see Red X’s on a website, especially when I know it’s due to hotlinking.

Some website owners, in an attempt to “get even” with a bandwidth thief, will replace a hotlinked image with an offensive image…and if the thief’s web host were to discover this, they could shut that website down (it does happen!). But bandwidth theft in and of itself can be cause enough for a host to shut a website down.

How Do You Know if You’re Hotlinking?

The easiest way to know if you are hotlinking your images is to right-click on them and then click on Properties. Look at the URL of that image: does it show YOUR URL or someone else’s? If it’s someone else’s then you are hotlinking!

How Can You Avoid Hotlinking?

OK, well that’s an easy one. Never right-click on a website’s image and copy its URL and then paste it into your website code to display that image! Instead, you should always, always, ALWAYS, right-click the image, and SAVE it to your computer, then upload it to your own website’s server. This applies to banners you want to use in exchanges, topsites banners, ad buttons, or any other type of linked image or file. Always upload images to your own server.