Hotlinking images from this site

I had to make changes to stop the hotlinking of images off of my hosting account. Sometimes the site loads extremely slowly when there’s barely any users connected, so I decided to google the path to most of my pictures to see if it came up on other sites.

What I found out is that many places, forums, and other popular sites are leeching off my bandwidth. In this day and age it’s really sad that people still don’t understand the concept of free image hosting, and many still share the image’s URL instead.

As of now if you want to share any of the pictures I post here you can download them to your computer (or whatever device you connect to the net from) and upload them to any image sharer website out there. If you try to post a picture from this server on any other website using the direct URL you will get a picture that reads “STOP HOTLINKING.”

Of course this will have some side effects, like people not being able to see any images from my website while browsing it, and some websites won’t display thumbnails when sharing any of my links. There’s also a possibility that my RSS feed doesn’t display images properly, so please let me know if you can’t see any images on this site or the RSS feed.

I’ll give it a month and see how it goes. I hope the site won’t be as slow as it’s been in the last few months, and for the love of humanity, STOP THAT BAD HABIT OF HOTLINKING PICTURES! Seriously, there are many places to upload whatever it is that you want to share, there is really no excuse for not using a free image sharer/hosting.

Some of the more popular free image hosting websites are imageshack, photobucket, imgur, and tinypic. You can also share pictures from your flickr or picasa account.

There are many other places, so do a Google search for free image hosting or free image sharing, I’m sure there will be plenty of websites to choose from. With so many choices out there I don’t see the need to steal bandwidth from any site at all.