 |
| What is direct or hotlinking? |
| "Hotlinking" (also called "hot linking", "leeching",
and "bandwidth theft") |
| is a term referring to when a web page of one website owner is
direct linking to the images |
| or other multimedia files on the web host of another website owner
(usually without permission, |
| thus stealing bandwidth). |
| |
| This not only causes the other person to pay for the bandwidth
of the hotlinked file, |
| but often is intellectual property theft. |
| |
| The term is also used loosely (a misnomer) by free image hosts
|
| which allow you to store images on their server and allow you
to direct link |
| the hosted image files on forums or other websites. |
| |
| One of the most common occurrences of "hot
linking" is when people are forum posting and they hotlink |
| pictures from another website to use as
avatars or signature images on the messageboards (forums). |
| |
| Some disadvantages of hot linking worth considering are that the
webpage generally |
| loads slower when you link to images stored on a different web
hosting server than the webpage is |
| hosted on, and the owner of the image has full control to disable
hotlinking, |
| or delete, rename, or worse yet, do a "switcheroo"
|
| (i.e., switching the file name to be another image) which is sure
to cause |
| the hotlinker embarrassment) of the hot-linked image. |
| |
| If you dont have your own online serverspace
you can use one of the many providers wich offers |
| image uploading for free, you can hotlink
those images to your own site. |
| |
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