A few days ago, I noticed that three images from this site were being hotlinked at other websites.
For those of you who don’t know what hotlinking is and are too lazy to click the link I provided, hotlinking is when someone uses an image from your website without bothering to save the image on their own server space. So the’re not just using your image, they’re using your bandwidth, too. For reasons that will soon be obvious, it’s a really stupid thing to do.
But first… in my case, bandwidth isn’t really an issue. Barring some extraordinary circumstances, I will never use more than my monthly allotment of bandwidth. And it certainly isn’t someone taking the images from my site that’s the problem. Hell, all three of the photos being used are images I got from a Google image search. I at least had the decency to put the pics on my own server.
I could easily make it impossible for people to hotlink images from my domain, but then I wouldn’t be able to use my own server space to store images/media to be posted on message boards and such.
The issue with hotlinking is twofold: One, there are several free image hosting services available. If a person wants to post images on message boards, MySpace, et cetera, they are able to do so without leeching someone else’s bandwidth. Two – and this is important – it’s a really stupid thing to do, because when you use my bandwidth to put an image on a message board or someone else’s blog, you are giving me control over what image appears on your website.
Someone used a picture of Charles Bronson from one of my posts. As of this writing, they haven’t figured it out yet. Can you guess which photo is mine? In case they’ve gotten wise, here’s a screen capture of the page. It should go without saying… if you’re at work, you might get fired for clicking on these links.
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