hotlinkings mostly just using assets directly from another site, therefore using their bandwidth instead of hosting it on your own and webrings are mostly a pre-indexing (and/or early geocities neighborhoods) to try to interconnect peoples sites together based on interests or w/e
web cache stuff, typically itll update pretty quickly on neocities' end (usually i just open my page in incognito bc i could care less to clear my browser cache every five seconds)