Hotlinking - What is it and why you shouldn't be doing it.

I was speaking with an eBay seller recently, he mentioned he'd been working on his own eBay listings template for a few months (!) and was very proud of it. He asked me to have a look. Right off the bat it was not a good design, it was a basic template, white background peppered with images hotlinked from other sites. One was of the item on sale, hotlinked from the manufacturer. Most were clip art like a delivery truck and a large animated exclamation mark. All hotlinked from other sites without permission.

What is hotlinking?

Hotlinking is directly linking to another websites files without permission. For example lets say you wanted to use an image of a spaceship on your page or listing. You find the exact right image you want on www.notmysite.com. Hotlinking the image would look like this:  <IMG SRC="http://wwww.notmysite.com/images/spaceship.jpg height="400" width="250">.  This means the server of notmysite.com will be using up additional bandwith to display the hotlinked image on your page. A simple analogy for this would be if a stranger came into your office and started charging their mobile phone from your plug sockets without asking. It's quite rude and costing you money.
Why should I stop hotlinking? It means more work.

If you happen to be hotlinking it's important to stop for 2 reasons.

1. You're using bandwidth paid for by the person whos image your using. Although not illegal, it’s really damned cheeky.

2. If the person you're hotlinking the image from notices (and that's very easy to do with services like copyscape) they can hit you with the switcheroo. An example this would be when The Huffington Post hotlinked an entire comic from Matt Inman, also known as The Oatmeal. Inman replaced all the hotlinked images with copies of his web hosting bill, to show how much this extra traffic from the hotlinking was costing him.

Here at Jarilo I've seen a hotlinked image of a childrens school bag be switched out for an image of a naked woman. Embarassing for the ebay seller and it could've easily led to his ebay store being taken down. I contacted the seller to advise them, they weren’t pleased when they found out.
How can I get images on my site or template without hotlinking?
Glad you asked. Firstly you can host them yourself, if you've a hosting package you can upload an image, grab the link and have it live instantly. This gives you a quicker load time and cause zero problems. If you want an easy, quick solution to image hosting without a hosting package we recommend photobucket for it's easy interface and cost (free). Check it out.

Going back to the client who showed me the listing template, I had to explain to him upfront that he couldn’t continue to hotlink images from other sites. Once he understood that, we were able to put together a beautiful design for his store. If you’re looking for a way to put images on your website or listing pages, there are many different, legitimate ways to go about it, hotlinking certainly isn’t one of them.