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## Protecting Your Site From Bandwidth Stealing (Hotlinking)

Hotlinking (also called file leeching, remote linking, direct linking, bandiwidth stealing or bandwidth banditism) is a term used for describing a situation when a web page of one domain owner is directly linking to images (or other multimedia files) on the web host of another domain owner, usually using an <IMG> tag. If your domain is hotlinked, you may face the problem of excessive bandwidth usage.

To protect your domain from hotlinking:

1. Click Hotlink Protection on your Home page.
2. Click Switch On to enable the protection from hotlinking.
3. Specify the extensions of files you wish to be protected from hotlinking (e.g. jpg, bmp, etc) in the Protected files extensions field. When listing several file extensions, separate them with spaces.
4. Click OK.

In this section: Allowing and Disallowing Domains to Directly Link to Your Domain Files