About Hotlinking

When arranging link exchanges, people sometimes ask for banner code instead of a banner image. Don’t give it to them.

Why? It’s hotlinking and that is never a good idea.

Here’s why:
You provide banner code which contains the image source code for your own banner. The person you give it to puts your banner code on their links page. From now on, every single time anyone visits that person’s links page, the page is generating your banner image not through that person’s site file system, but through your own site. This is known as hotlinking and it steals a great deal of bandwidth.

Because in the web hosting world there’s no such thing as unlimited bandwidth (try getting a computer with an unlimited hard drive), allowing hotlinking puts a strain on your hosting account. Your site could be suspended and a hefty fee leveled upon you should you go over what your web host considers normal usage.

Large advertising sites often give banner code. Most of these sites run on dedicated servers, as opposed to shared hosting, which is the norm for the majority of sites. Dedicated servers allow for more bandwidth flexibility.

More seriously, sites that supply banner code instead of an image are controlling what appears on your site. All the site needs to do to change what image is displayed on your site is change it in their own file structure. This is the primary advantage and reason why large ad sites tend to use banner code.

Hotlinking is largely considered to be impolite. Accept coded banners from some sites but please behave like a respectful website owner and never provide coded banners. Stick with banner images instead!