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### Protecting Sites 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 domains are hotlinked, you may face the problem of excessive bandwidth usage.

To protect a domain from hotlinking:

1. Click the Domains shortcut in the navigation pane.
2. Click the required domain name in the list.
3. Click Hotlink Protection in the Hosting group.
4. Click Switch On to enable the protection from hotlinking.
5. 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.
6. Click OK.

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