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Originally Posted by Ankie
Maybe an idea if any of you explains hot linking and what actually should be the way of posting it (to avoid using the bandwidth)?
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Sure. To get an image on a forum or website that image needs to be somewhere. Your options are:
1 - Upload to the forum or website
2 - Upload to somewhere else (e.g. photobucket) and link to that
3 - Link directly to wherever you found the image (this is hot-linking)
#3 is the problem. It's also the easiest to do. People do it because it's easy and/or they don't understand what's wrong with it.
What happens with hot-linking is that when the image is viewed the browser goes to the original web site that holds the image and gets it from there. So a page of messages on this forum is very often made up of images from lots of different web sites. This slows down the loading of the page (a bit, since your PC has to look up the address of each web site holding an image) and also puts the original web site servers to work to get the image for you.
Everyone who runs a web site gets a certain amount of bandwidth (a certain amount of data that can be uploaded and/or downloaded per month). When that limit is exceeded they either get charged more money or, if it's a free site, the site gets closed down till the end of the month. Neither option is good. This is why web site owners get hacked off that their bandwidth is being stolen.
Dave