(Plesk for Windows) Protecting Websites from Hotlinking

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Hotlinking is a situation when a web page of one domain owner is directly linked to images (or other multimedia files) on the web pages of another domain owner. If your domains are hotlinked, you may face the problem of excessive bandwidth usage.

Apart from hotlinking, you can come across other terms describing the same act: file leeching, remote linking, direct linking, bandwidth stealing, or bandwidth banditism.

To protect a website from hotlinking:

1. Go to Websites & Domains > domain you want to protect from hotlinking > Hotlink Protection.

2. Select the “Enable hotlink protection” checkbox.

3. In the “Protected files extensions” text field, specify the extensions of files you want to protect from hotlinking (for example, jpg, bmp, and so on). When listing several file extensions, separate them with spaces.

   For your convenience, the text field is prefilled with common file extensions.

4. (Optional) You can allow direct linking to your files from certain websites. To do so, type the website address into the “Addresses of friendly websites” text field: one website address per field.

   To add each additional website, click “Add one more”.

5. Click OK.