Am I doing a bad (hotlink-y) thing?

[DrakoTheDragon]

This might be a dumb question, but please bear with me. I'm pretty new to this indie web thing :/

On my website, you can see a green sidebar with cycling site buttons at the very top. As opposed to the buttons I have listed on my index page, these ones appear on like…40% of my site, as there's an identical bar on many different pages.

I've hosted any buttons myself when hotlinking isn’t allowed. But I'm worried that the ones I am hotlinking are costing the hosts even more bandwidth due to how many unique times those images are called upon. Is this even a thing? And if so, is it bad? I'd rather not host ALL those buttons myself, but I will if it's a problem.

[Melooon]

Normally when someone visits your site, the images that load are cached in their browser and they don't load again until that person clears their cache. So if someone loads an image on one page of your site, then visits 100 pages that all have that same image, the image does not re-download load 100 times, it loads once for that person, then comes from their browser cache 99 times.

Sooo, how many times you put an image on your site is not an issue, its how many unique visitors you get (and that will always be a much bigger number anyway).

There are other threads related to hot linking that discuss the actual hotink more, but for your question directly, no, putting it on multiple pages has no impact