Daily Archives: March 22, 2008

Rethinking Hotlinking

A long time ago, I disabled hotlinking to my websites. That is, one could not put an image of mine (src=”mywebsite.com/blank.jpg”) on their own website. I had a very good reason. People loved posting my Chalkboard Manifesto comics on other people’s MySpace pages. On my old host, the amount of hotlinking from MySpace made me go over my bandwidth limits. I switched to a new host, but I was still using bandwidth at an alarming rate. I had to disable hotlinking.

Although I’m still with that same host, they’ve since upped my bandwidth (and space). I’m reconsidering lifting that hotlinking ban. It’s amazing how little bandwidth and server space costs these days.