Hotlinking

Hotlinking is an internet term for displaying an image on a website by linking to the website hosting the image. The link gets the source data of the picture each time it is needed.

This avoids having the image on every website which uses it. So, a website owner uses a link to the picture such as https://example.com/picture.jpg. When the hotlinking website is loaded, the image is loaded from the original website, which uses its bandwidth, so it costs the hotlinked website money. For this reason many website owners use .htaccess files to prevent hotlinking. In some cases website owners use the .htaccess file to replace any hotlinked images with an offensive image to deter any other website owners from hotlinking. Hotlinked images are usually hosted on sites like imgur.

The original image may be owned by the original website. It might be wrong to make a copy of the original image file for use on a different web page, without being careful to get proper permission.

Hotlinking can also be used for file types other than images, including documents and videos.

 Example 
Hotlinking is known as the act of using another website's bandwidth by linking directly to their website's assets, such as images or videos. For example, say the owner of website A is hosting a particular image on their server. The owner of website B sees that image and decides they want it on their website as well. However, instead of downloading the image and hosting it on their own server, the owner of website B links directly to website A's domain. Therefore, instead of linking to the image via their own domain such as:

 https://websiteB.com/path/to/image.jpg

They would be instead using website A's domain:

 https://websiteA.com/path/to/image.jpg

Hotlinking someone's website assets can vastly increase their hosting costs.

 References 

Category:Internet slang