What is hotlinking? Its when you place an image or file of any sort on your website and directly link to where you found it, instead of placing it on your own webhost’s servers.

Why is it wrong to hotlink? Because, basically, its theft. All webhosts charge for bandwidth usage (in one way or another) and so if you hotlink to another website’s images or files you are stealing their bandwidth instead of paying for it yourself.

Also, they might pull a switcheroo on you if they find out about your stealing activities. And what is a switcheroo? Its when the actual owners of the file change the file to be not what you thought it was: Here’s an example:

An Italian politician found a nice image of the pantheon online and used it on his website, it looked like this:

The owner of the image got a little miffed as his hits sent her bandwidth through the roof. So, after no replies to her ‘cease and desist’ request, she pulled the old switcheroo which resulted in his website looking like this:

Pfffff! Today’s lesson is: Don’t Hotlink

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