Do you know what hotlinking is? It's the most common way for other web designers to steal your bandwidth, and it can cost you a lot of money. It involves putting a direct link to a website's non-HTML files on someone else's page.
For example, let's say you've made one of the best adult sites on the Internet. People love coming to your site because it has so many pictures. Now, imagine that all of a sudden, even though your number of users isn't going up, the amount of data being sent from your site to viewers is going up. The people who run your server call you to tell you that you are sending out 40% more images now than you were last week.
Has your income grown in the same way? No. Has the number of people who visit your site grown? No. What's happened is that someone didn't just steal your pictures, but instead put a link to them on their own website.
This means that they are linking to your image on your site instead of saving it in their own images directory. In the very early days of the web, this was an acceptable way to steal an image as long as you gave credit where it was due. Today, when bandwidth is expensive and there are a lot more high-resolution images online, it's not okay.
What's the point?
There are a lot of reasons to hotlink images. For example, say someone who isn't very experienced has just started blogging or selling on eBay. They want an image, but they are smart enough to know that it is against the law to copy it and put it on their website. So, they think, you won't notice if just one other site links to yours. Also, they need that image a lot.
That's a harmless use that probably won't do much to improve your image serving. But what if you run a site with a lot of images, like an art site, and a competitor decides to just use the images you've uploaded to sell posters? That is not good. And if they use all of your images, they can double or even triple the amount of bandwidth you use, with no good for you. Even bad webmasters use this to drive competitors out of business, since the web host either charges for the extra bandwidth or takes the site offline. And, sadly, it is not against the law. Yet. (Although, if someone complains, some web servers will shut down a hotlinking site.)
A good comparison would be if someone wired their house to your utility pole. They don't pay for the electricity that goes through your home, but you do. Many hotlinkers try to justify what they're doing by saying it's like stealing cable, which it's not at all, because cable users pay one flat rate for all the services they use, or like using someone else's wireless WAN connection. This is not true, and hotlinking is even harder to hide than any of these examples. All you need is a little bit of time and a good Google search.
Am I Hotlinking?
Hotlinking is when you link directly to an image or other non-HTML file that isn't on your own website and you don't have the webmaster's permission to do it that way. You are hotlinking when you see a link that starts with src="http://" and then lists a domain that is not yours. The bandwidth to serve this image won't cost you anything; it will cost the person whose image you're stealing. See how electricity is like that?
You can host images and other files from your own image directory, or you can upload them to a free image server that allows hotlinking in its usage rules. Otherwise, just don't do it.
Even though people who hotlink are hard to catch, there are ways to punish them. For example, some webmasters use the "switcheroo," in which they replace the image you've been stealing with something very offensive, pornographic, or annoying. For example, they might change your header flower to a picture of a body part or a person holding a sign that says "This person steals the bandwidth." When you use a hotlink, you give someone else the chance to change your site.
There are services that can check your image links one by one to see if they have been stolen or if they are safe from hotlinking. These are sites that have a form where you can put the URL of your own image. The next page may or may not have your image. If it does, you know that you are weak. If you need to check a lot of pictures, you might have to pay for a service to do it for you.
But if you have time to check all your images, there is a much easier way to do it. Just do a search on Google for the full URL link. If someone is putting your image URL on their page, it will show up in the URL search. At that point, you can do a switcheroo, warning the webmaster or making a complaint to the website's host, depending on what needs to be done.
You can stop people from hotlinking to your images, movies, sounds, etc. by using an. httpaccess file correctly or by talking to your server administrator. Before you upload an. httpaccess file, you should always ask an administrator to look it over.
What else do I need to know about hotlinks?
Even though there aren't many official ways to complain about hotlinking right now, it is likely that this will become a more serious crime in the future. Instead of hotlinking, email webmasters whose content you like and ask if you can use it if you link back to their site. Many will say yes because links back are valuable. Protect your own pictures, and even if they are safe, check on them often. And to stop plain old copying, you should learn how to watermark your valuable images.
