Earlier today, DChetty spotted another website hotlinking to images on his website. Naturally, this is not only theft in certain cases, but it’s also frowned upon by the web industry, as each time the image is loaded, bandwidth and CPU power is pulled from the original sources server.
Here’s the website with the Idols image, stolen from DChetty:
Anyway, I saw this and quickly tweeted DChetty telling him to change the image on his side and that’s exactly what he did, take a look:
PWNED!!!
Yes, hotlinking is a big no-no! That is classic. I’m still waiting for peeps to hotlink some pics from my site. There is this cool story, about a guy who had a massive leech of one of his pics. In the end he replaced it with goatse. I kid you not!
Read here:
http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011
Ye NielDLR – I must have a look around and see if anyone’s hotlinking my images, I’ve got some nasty ideas ;)
Funny stuff!
But I disagree with you about hotlinking images. After I read an article written by Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow ages ago I’ve changed my mind completely http://bit.ly/2lcxha
“Don’t worry about “bandwidth stealing.” There’s an enormous fooforaw among site operators about people who “hotlink” to images — linking directly to images on an external site, rather than to the page the image came from. Dear site operators: Here’s a quarter, go buy a terabyte from Amazon S3 and stop complaining. Back in the paleolithic era, inlining could add up to real money. If your hosting company is charging you enough for bandwidth in 2008 that you’re still worrying about it, you need a new host. With your URL in your images (see above), every one of those inlining events is just a way of directing traffic back to your site. An inlined image is LOTS cheaper than a Google Ad, and far more targeted.”
I hear your point Wezz.
Thing is, if you’re hosting locally in South Africa, it’s darn expensive and when thresholds are reached, it’s even more expensive, so if someone from a high traffic site hotlinks, it can be damaging. iMod goes through 95GB/month of traffic, I certainly couldn’t afford any hotlinking, if I go over the 100GB, it’s guna get way too expensive.
So, ye, I get your point and it makes perfect sense, but in general I still don’t think it’s right to hotlink – it’s also risky, if you hotlink and the source site goes down, you’re guna have load problems..
Yes if you’re hosting a site in SA and 4Chan hotlinks an image you’re pretty much screwed. The point is to be smart about it, host your images with Amazon, yes if they go down you’ll have problems.
“it’s also risky, if you hotlink and the source site goes down, you’re guna have load problems”
I personally don’t hotlink, I used to in the past but yes been burnt many times with photobucket etc. going down. Although we’re talking about others hotlinking our content. I don’t think you should bare any grudge or get upset about it. Watermark it with a URL and move on.
You have a sound argument bud, I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree?
From an ethical point of view, I say it’s bad. However, depends who hotlinks then again as well..
I think 90% of the time it’s never done with malicious intent, it’s usually done by bloggers with little to no experience in hosting their own site, usually blogspot owners – me 3 years ago :P. So I don’t think you can go as far at all to throw the ethical card.
Ye, that’s true, I agree that 90% of the time it’s done without malicious intent :)
@Chris – Agree with you that the cost of bandwidth, even if your not in South Africa can add up.
Also for reliability and independence of your site, rather host the image yourself, then you know your in control, instead when the “hotlinked” website goes down, you still have the content on your site, and not unproffessional blanks left on your site.
Ye absolutely @Arné; I do think Wezz makes some good points though, but I’m sticking to my guns about my opinion.
Has it ever happened to you?