Wow - I learned some stuff here! Thank you for taking the time to reply.
You’re right - it is the same as going to the directory domain/directory. I never knew that! I’m trying to envision your site, would love to see it if you can share a link. I’m working on the new site (Squirrel Cart installation) and trying to structure it to include products from Cafe Press, Zazzle and similar sites. I also wanted to set up fundraising. The way you described breaking your site up perhaps the sub-domains are better suited for those things. I’ve thought about the separate url for images too, and I’m not too far into the new site to do that. My thought is that all this hotlinking is what is causing the database to overload and slam the site. Does that make sense to you? Or is the direct link they’re grabbing to the images not create dB queries?
Regarding the hotlinking, I am concerned that if I enable the hotlinking and just whitelist (which it allows me to do - its the standard cpanel) that just allowing something like google.com won’t work.