Hotlinking bad. Devil Doll angry.
August 5th, 2003

Why is hotlinking wrong?

Hotlinking is not only bad netiquette, it's theft. Hotlinking to an image steals bandwidth.

What is bandwidth?

Bandwidth is to websites what gasoline is to cars. It's what powers them and enables them to be seen on your computer monitor. Every time you go to a website and look at a page, all the little images and words that are stored on that site's server get sent through cyberspace to your computer. Bandwidth is the energy used to send those images and words. Every time you look at something on a website, it uses up a little bit of that site's bandwidth.

Most sites only get a certain amount of bandwidth (measured in gigabytes) per month, and if they go over their allowance, the site either shuts down for the rest of the month, or the owner of the website has to pay for any bandwidth over and above their allowable limit.

What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking is linking to an image on someone else's server.

Let's say you're over at the idiotsandflamewarsabound.com message board, talking about Wolverine's hair, and you decide that you need to post a picture of his fabulous hair. So you go over to wolverineandrogue.com (because you know it's the best website ever *g*), and you find a picture of Wolverine's hair that you really like.

If you right-click on that picture, save it to your computer, upload it to your own personal webspace, and then put *your* URL in the img tags on the message board, you are a good kid and should get a cookie.

If you right-click the URL for that picture at wolverineandrogue.com and paste it into your img tags at the message board, you are stealing my bandwidth.

See, every time someone looks at that thread, and that picture of Wolverine's hair loads onto their computer monitor, it's being sent from my server. Using my bandwidth.

Posting a link to an image is not the same as hotlinking. If you post the URL for the image so that people can click on it and see the picture you're referring to, that's fine. If you actually make the image appear in your post, using a www.wolverineandrogue.com URL, that's hotlinking.

This is Good:

Look at this cool pic!
http://www.wolverineandrogue.com/indeximages/wolvietankhowlsm.jpg

This is also Good:

Look at this cool pic!

This is Bad:

Look at this cool pic I hotlinked from wolverineandrogue.com, even though I know I'm not supposed to because it's wrong!

But I still don't understand why that's wrong.

Here's a comparison:

Let's say you build a house.  It's a really nice house, and you like it a lot, and you work hard every day to earn money to pay for your house, and all the bills associated with it.

A few months later, someone else builds a house near yours.  But instead of calling the electric company and getting a line run to their house, they tap into your power line.  Every time they turn on a light or run the blender in their home, they use some your electricity.  And every little bit of it is logged on your meter, the electric company bills you accordingly.    

Maybe you don't notice the difference at first, but then another house gets built in the neighborhood, and another, and another.  And pretty soon, your monthly electric bill, which has been increasing steadily over the past few months, is *huge*.  Even though you're convinced you aren't using any more electricity than you used to, your bill is way more than it's ever been, and that just doesn't make sense.  

So you go outside and look at your power line, and you notice that *every single house in the neighborhood has tapped into your electricity, and all this time you've been paying for all your neighbors to heat and light their homes*.

Would you be mad?

Would you think that was a pretty crappy thing to do?

Would you consider that theft?  Would you feel like they'd stolen money from you, by forcing you to pay for their electricity without your knowledge?

That's what hotlinking is, and that's why people get so angry about it.

So don't do it.

If I catch you, I won't be nice about it.

Devil Doll