July 24, 2019
3min Read
Jordana A.
Having a problem with malicious users that try to threaten your website’s security? We’ve got you covered. In this article, we’ll give you the steps on how to block an IP address using Hostinger’s IP Manager tool and .htaccess. In addition, we’ll teach you how to do geo-blocking with .htaccess which is how you can block an entire country from accessing your site.
It’s a common knowledge that the internet is an open space where everyone across the world has access to it 24/7. Consequently, your website is no different. While online businesses see this as an opportunity to gain revenue, from another side of things, it’s a potential threat to users’ privacy and security.
Why so? Criminals exist in the world, and there are no bounds whether it’s in your city or your website. These individuals take the form of spammers, hackers, and toxic users.
Harmful intentions vary in terms of the level of harm some people want to commit. The best case scenario is that they post negative and/or offensive comments on your site.
However, that can quickly escalate and cause a potential security breach if you don’t take immediate preventive action.
One of the best security practices you can employ is by blocking their IP address. Similar to your home address, an Internet Protocol address is a unique identifier that every machine within a network has.
By blocking a users’ IP address, you sever their line of communication and prevent them from accessing your website.
There are a couple of methods on how to block an IP address from accessing your site. The easiest way would be to doing so using the IP Manager feature on your Control Panel.
Here’s how it’s done:
Congratulations! You have blocked access to the user from that particular IP address. To prevent several IP addresses from accessing your site, you can repeat these steps as many times as necessary.
Another way to block an IP address is by using .htaccess which is a file you can access if you’re running Apache as your web server (Hostinger uses Apache). By denying an IP address’ access in Apache web server’s configuration file, the banning process can be executed before your site is fully loaded.
Here’s how to do it through your .htaccess file:
Order Deny, Allow Deny from 127.0.0.1
Make sure you create a backup copy of the original code in the case of failure. Once you’re done, click Save & Close.
That’s all! Pretty easy and straightforward, right?
There are cases where the attacks come from a certain country. Or, you probably don’t want your content to be accessible in some countries for specific reasons. To solve this scenario, you can deny access from a particular country using the .htaccess file.
Blocking an IP address is one of the best ways to protect your website from malicious attacks. Contrary to popular belief, it can be easily done using the IP Manager and the .htaccess file.
To block an IP address using IP Manager, you need to:
If you choose to use .htaccess file instead, you need to:
You can also block access to your site from a certain country using .htaccess file:
Using these methods, your site will be a safe place for everyone, especially you.
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