Why it’s bad to Hotlink

Hotlinking is the frowned upon practice of serving content (mostly images) from another website's server. For example, you have a post about the Metro Comic Con and you use the link from Manila Reviews' website as your image source:

<img src="http://manilareviews.com/images/metrocomicon.jpg" alt="" />

What happens here is that when your readers read your post, they load the image from Manila Reviews, thus eating up Manila Reviews' bandwidth. This is bad for the source website because it would slow down their server and, if they had a limited bandwidth plan, consume their plan without generating hits.

This is why it's considered very bad practice and just plain rude.

Instead of hotlinking, get the website's permission to download the pic and serve it off your own server. Most bloggers aren't selfish - you just have to ask.

*photo from dr_relling (flickr)

Looks like we have a brand spanking new topic here.