What Is Hotlinking?

When you are looking at your website design, you may come across the term hotlinking. Hotlinking, inline linking, remote linking and many other terms are used to describe a way taking images, or other files and embedding it directly into a website. In other words, it is the unauthorized use of someone else's bandwidth. Hotlinked files are files not stored on your own server. For example, a hotlinked image code would look something like this:

 

<img scr="http://www.notmysite.com/not-my-image.jpg">

 

Why is hotlinking wrong?

If the person who owns the media file you are embedding into your own website gives permission to hotlink, then nothing is wrong. However, this is not normally the case.

 

If you do not have permission, remote linking to any media and/or program file is theft. Even if it is a clipart archive offering free images, a music server giving away free tunes or a website with freeware. Unless the original website specifically states otherwise, hotlinking is stealing.

 

You may say "I didn't steal anything, the file is right where the owner left it!" However, each time a file is called from our servers we have what is called a data transfer request, or another way of saying it, we have bandwidth used.

 

Bandwidth is a bit like gas for a car. Every time you drive (or a file is loaded), a bit of fuel (or bandwidth) is used up. Now imagine if each night one of your neighbors siphoned out a tiny bit for their own car, then other neighbors thought "I'll just take a couple drops as well", by morning your fuel tank is empty. Your neighbors each thought taking just a tiny bit would be unnoticeable, but added all up it left nothing for you.

 

Serving up images is not only usually our biggest consumer of bandwidth, when others remotely link to them, i.e. embed them in their websites from our servers without our permission, we have to pay as bandwidth is not free. Most websites have a limited amount of data transfer and the website owners either have to pay extra money each month to pay the fees, or face shutting down.