Wget’s recursive retrieval normally refuses to visit hosts different than the one you specified on the command line. This is a reasonable default; without it, every retrieval would have the potential to turn your Wget into a small version of google.
However, visiting different hosts, or host spanning, is sometimes a useful option. Maybe the images are served from a different server. Maybe you’re mirroring a site that consists of pages interlinked between three servers. Maybe the server has two equivalent names, and the HTML pages refer to both interchangeably.
The ‘-H’ option turns on host spanning, thus allowing Wget’s recursive run to visit any host referenced by a link. Unless sufficient recursion-limiting criteria are applied depth, these foreign hosts will typically link to yet more hosts, and so on until Wget ends up sucking up much more data than you have intended.
The ‘-D’ option allows you to specify the domains that will be followed, thus limiting the recursion only to the hosts that belong to these domains. Obviously, this makes sense only in conjunction with ‘-H’. A typical example would be downloading the contents of ‘www.example.com’, but allowing downloads from ‘images.example.com’, etc.:
wget -rH -Dexample.com http://www.example.com/
You can specify more than one address by separating them with a comma, e.g. ‘-Ddomain1.com,domain2.com’.
If there are domains you want to exclude specifically, you can do it with ‘--exclude-domains’, which accepts the same type of arguments of ‘-D’, but will exclude all the listed domains. For example, if you want to download all the hosts from ‘foo.edu’ domain, with the exception of ‘sunsite.foo.edu’, you can do it like this:
wget -rH -Dfoo.edu --exclude-domains sunsite.foo.edu \
http://www.foo.edu/