So I am relatively new to running a website and have a question about thumbnails. The main page of my site displays about 80 thumbnails for other websites. The load time for my site is not slow but its not fast. The thumbnails all come from another site (http://www.thumbshots.de/) and I was wondering if this effected my load time. Would it be faster or slower if I hosted the thumbnails on my own domain? Thanks The site is getyourlol.com if you would like to see what I'm talking about.
linking to an image that is hosted on another server that you don't own is called 'hotlinking' images. Typically, hotlinking is considered to be in bad taste and is strongly discouraged, and in some cases it may even be illegal, depending on the licenses by which the images were posted on the first website. As for load time, putting them on your site won't guarantee they'll load faster, because it's entirely *possible* that your server could just transfer the files at a slower rate then the original site, but in all liklihood yes, if you put the images (if you have license to use them) on your server it will probably load faster. Also, hotlinking content provides a unique security risk in that often when people realize somebody is stealing their bandwidth and hotlinking images they will simply replace the images with something offensive like homosexual pornography and then guess what you're showing all your visitors? So yes, it is bad, fix it ASAP