What does "hot-linking" mean

Question

I have no idea what it is. I would like to know before I go downloading anything so I don't hurt or annoy anyone. And what is "band-width", by the way? Sorry, I'm new to owning my own computer.

Answer 1

Hot linking is where you post a picture that is not hosted on your own server.  That means for example that you wanted to reference a photo say: http://us.i1.yimg.com/us.yimg.com/i/us/s... and you use that photo.  Since it's not on your own server it is considered "hot linking".

Bandwidth is a measurement of either speed or amount of data used depending on how you use the word.  You could have a 3MB bandwidth connection from your phone company.  Additionally your bandwidth limit is 50Gigs for the month.

It's bad to "hot link" an image because the server where the image is held is often accountable for the bandwidth charges the occur in a month.  It's not a big deal if the server is huge and the company is gigantic.  However, if you are a smaller website / company and you have your images being linked all over the world wasting your bandwidth then it's a big issue.

Hope that answers your questions,

Chad

Answer 2

Bandwidth is basically how big your traffic pipe is.  Think of it as how many cars can be on a two lane road for one mile.  That is the bandwidth of the road.  Bandwidth speed is smilar to the speed limit of a road.

Now hot-linking is where someone makes a webpage and borrows someone elses images or files for their site.  Typically when you build a webpage you make the page and upload your images to some where on the internet.  This is typically done to your own servers.  When you hot link you build a page and put the code from someone elses website for the image to be on yours even though the image is on their server.  This is sometimes called bandwidth theft.

A simple analogy for bandwidth theft: Imagine a random stranger plugging into your electrical outlets, using your electricity without your consent, and you paying for it.

Hotlinking is done a lot with spam advertising.