RANT: HOT LINKING to other sites

[Hans_]

tribz wrote:
If they had linked back, wouldnt it have had the same effect anyway? 10k hits doesnt sound like a lot. Is your hoster stingy with bandwidth?

It's not the same. If someone links to your site, then you have people visiting your site. If, on the other-hand, someone hotlinks to one of your image, then they are showing one of your images on their site, and using up your bandwidth. That's not fair; a website should pay for the bandwidth of its own visitors, instead of using up someone else's bandwidth.

I once had a European computer store hotlink to one of the images on my website, and I was getting my bandwidth used up by people who weren't visiting my site at all. I solved it by renaming the image so that it broke all their image links.

If you want to show someone else's images on your site, get permission, and host it yourself.

Hans

[Hans_]

Trev wrote:

Well, except by hot linking, the end user is only downloading the image. If you linked to the page hosting the image, they'd also be downloading the hosting page and any other referenced elements, i.e. using even more bandwidth. It's a lose-lose situation.

The point is that with hot-linking your bandwidth is being used up by non-related traffic, whereas linking to your website results in more visitors. Those visitors have to click on the link, whereas with hot-linking, they just use up your bandwidth. Yes, that may result in even more bandwidth, but it's the result of actual visitors. With some sites this is just a nuisance, but if you're making money from your website (e.g., an online shop, or a popular blog with adverts), then someone else using up your bandwidth for people who don't even visit your site is a big deal.

Bottom line, if one doesn't want the public downloading one's stuff, one shouldn't publish it  in the first place.

This isn't about whether someone should be viewing the images or not, it's about one publisher using up someone else's bandwidth.

I'm fine with paying for extra bandwidth if I get a large influx of visitors from another site; I'm not okay with paying for bandwidth used up by another site embedding my content into their pages.

Hans