Protecting Sites From Bandwidth Stealing (Windows Hosting)

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 pages 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. Go to Domains > domain name > Hotlink Protection.
  2. Click Switch On to enable the protection from hotlinking.
  3. Specify the extensions of files you wish to be protected from hotlinking (for example, jpg, bmp, and so on) in the Protected files extensions field. When listing several file extensions, separate them with spaces.
  4. Click OK.