Is there any harm in hosting images off site? [closed]

Question

Is there any harm hosting images through a website like Imgur then using the code provided to insert it into my website? Versus the traditional way of hosting the images on my server and linking them appropriately.

Answer 1

The risk is that Imgur goes away and takes you images with it. Or that they have performance problems or outages that you have no control over or visibility into. But ideally some image hosting platform would be more reliable that anything you come up with. Just make sure you keep a copy of you make it relatively easy to switch back to local hosting or another image hosting platform in case you have problems with Imgur.

Along those same lines, it complicates your deployments. You aren't just uploading your one website, you need to upload your site to your servers, upload the images to the other site, and then do whatever configuration is necessary to make sure that your production verison is pointing to the right servers (as opposed to pointing to a QA/Dev server).

Also, if you have any HTTPS on your site, make sure that any images (or JS or CSS or anything else) that you reference from your page is also HTTPS, otherwise your users will get that annoying "this page contains insecure content" error.

Lastly make sure you are operating within the terms and conditions of the hosting company, they may not like you sending them that much traffic and may block you out or throttle you. If you are not sure, ask them.

However, if you do take this approach, it can often have many performance benefits. It reduces the amount of traffic to your site and takes some load off of your web servers. Some browsers may download more simultaneously as well, because some browser versions only open a certain number of concurrent connections to a single domain but will open more connections to other domains (although this may not be the case any more). And of course, again the Imgur servers are probably faster then yours and probably have a content delivery network (CDN) which transmits copies of your images our all over the world so people are getting content from local content cache servers instead of always going back to your server.

Answer 2

Read the terms of service for the site you plan to use. From your example of Imgur, their ToS states:

Also, don't use Imgur to host image libraries you link to from elsewhere, content for your website, advertising, avatars, or anything else that turns us into your content delivery network. If you do – and we will be the judge – or if you do anything illegal, in addition to any other legal rights we may have, we will ban you along with the site you're hotlinking from, delete all your images, report you to the authorities if necessary, and prevent you from viewing any images hosted on Imgur.com. We mean it.

— http://imgur.com/tos (20.04.2016)

I know that Flickr's ToS says something similar (must link to Flickr, don't abuse it, etc.).

EDIT: You are describing a CDN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network) which, assuming you use a reputable provider, is a perfectly acceptable way of reducing your web page's load time.