Do NOT Hotlink
Many media-rich websites have fallen victim to webmasters who practice "hotlinking." For those of you who do not know what this is, hotlinking is the act of a webmaster linking to a file on someone else's website that is a graphic, sound clip, video clip, PDF document, or any file that is not an HTML page.
I provide links to other websites on various pages of my site as well as a page specifically for links to other websites. Other websites may also link to my website. No problem, this is normal. That is the whole purpose of the internet: to link websites together. However, linking to another website's individual non-HTML files is a whole other story, akin to hooking up your electrical appliances to your neighbor's electrical outlet, which would unfairly increase your neighbor's electric bill.
Whenever a website's file is downloaded, bandwidth is being used. As with most webmasters who run sites with a fairly large number of files, I pay for my web hosting. Many paid web hosting plans give you so much bandwidth as part of the normal monthly (or annual) hosting fee. If the webmaster's site goes over the bandwidth limit, the host either suspends the account (so no more websurfers can visit the site) for a certain period of time or bills the webmaster for the excess bandwidth used (usually per excess GB over the limit). If many webmasters link directly to one or more of another particular webmaster's binary files, it becomes very possible for the victim's bandwidth bill to spike very high.
As an example, let's say another webmaster links to a sound clip on my site that is 60 Kb in size and his or her website gets 100 visitors per day. Let's say out of those 100 visitors, twenty (20) of them listen to the sound clip linked to my webspace. That is an extra 36,000 Kb (20*30*60) of bandwidth used per month (~35.1 Mb) in addition to the bandwidth consumed during the normal display of my website and visitor downloading of my sound clips. I know what you're thinking: an extra 35.1 Mb is no big deal. This is true, but keep in mind that's from only one webmaster engaging in the practice. If a hundred other webmasters with similar traffic did the same thing, it would amount to an extra 3.43 Gb of monthly bandwidth used from my site that I may or may not have to pay for, depending on how close I was to the monthly bandwidth limit without the extra. Also, keep in mind this is just one sound. What if hundreds of webmasters linked directly to "many" of my sound files? My monthly bandwidth bill could get so huge I may have to close!
Many webmasters who engage in the practice of hotlinking are just starting out creating websites and do not know any better. However, there are those who know exactly what they are doing and they do not care. Why should they? They don't have to pay for it; the webmaster whose file(s) they are hotlinking does!
What some webmasters do not realize is that the practice of hotlinking is also very stupid. What if the files on the website are changed by the person? Then, the hotlinker's site would look stupid with broken links and the wrong file loading.
If the practice of hotlinking continues, we may very well see an end to free media on the internet. This is something that should never happen. Instead of linking directly to another website's media files, copy the files to your own server and link to them in your webspace. Don't be a bandwidth poacher.