Simple bandwidth question

[Gizmo]

What is bandwidth exactly? I know there's a rule against hotlinking because that can increase bandwidth and cause the site from which the hotlink came from to slow down. I understand that a little bit, but I'm not 110% clear.

Can someone explain?

TIA...

[Statica]

Bandwidth is the term used to represent the total data being transferred at a time. It could be the bandwidth between USB device and your computer or it could be the data transfered between a webserver and your computer.

Why is hotlinking bad? Nearly every webpage is on a host that allocates a certain amount of data transfer per month for a certain charge; if this acnt exceeds then the webmaster/owner has to pay money. It isnt cheap. If a site had an image about 100K in size, and you visited it, you have consumed 100K of their bandwidth - suppose you hotlink to the site by posting the image on these forums. Assume that 100 people come to the thread on the forum; that's like 10000K of the owner's bandwidth consumed without a single person actually going to the guy's site.

---

_{edited post to correct typo}

[Gizmo]

Aaaaah, seems a lot simpler now. I see that hotlinking can be bad because there was a site I always used to go to that was having bandwidth issues caused by hotlinking, or that's what the site owner said anyway. Thanks for the enlightenment!