Hotlinking
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Joe Carter seeks to show a hotlinker a lesson.
(Yes, I've been guilty of hotlinking many times--sorry!)
(Yes, I've been guilty of hotlinking many times--sorry!)
posted by JT at Thursday, May 03, 2007
5 Comments:
That's awesome! Hilarious! I love it!
As a new blogger, I'd appreciate anyone who can explain what the sin here is.
Whatever, though, Joe's little trick is very funny.
Hey Chris,
The reason "hotlinking" is frowned upon is the person who is hosting the image has to pay for the bandwidth charges. It's like if your neighbor decided to plug an appliance to your electrical outlet without your consent. A blog like Huffington Post gets a lot of traffic which means the image gets downloaded more often, increasing the bandwidth that is being used. (By the way, Blumenthal not only linked to it on HP but on two other blogs as well.)
Because FRC has its own servers we can absorb such traffic without really affecting anything. But if they had done it to a smaller blogger who pays for their own hosting, it could drive up their costs considerably.
If anyone else had "hotlinked" to one of our images we wouldn't have really minded. But Blumenthal has a history of writing scurrilous half-truths about FRC. He continues to repeat lies even after being corrected just because he doesn't like us. So we thought this would be a funny way to get a jab in at him, without being too mean-spirited.
I, too, am pretty ignorant here. I didn't even know this could be done.
I realize hotlinking is not right. But just following up on Joe's comment, don't people pay for webhosting by the month or year, and not be the MegaByte? At least that's how I pay.
That's true in general, Alex, but not in the extreme. The account most of us who have hosted sites or blogs pay for does not include unlimited bandwidth. If your site starts generating high amounts of bandwidth requests, your provider may either shut you down or demand you pay for a higher level account to cover the costs.
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