How do you prevent users from accessing your website?

Question

I want to block an entire nation, namely an African scamming nation from visiting my website. Does anyone know to block certain IPs, or a simple method to completely block large groups of people from a certain location?

Answer 1

Well you can set up a password so only the people you want can access the site, but most likely it's either block everyone or allow everyone. I don't think there is an in-between here. God Bless.

Answer 2

Assuming that you are hosting the site yourself, it's pretty simple to block IP addresses at the gateway. If you're using an outside hosting service you'd have to contact them to see if they can block at the gateway for you.

Many web servers have the ability to block certain IPs or ranges from the system. However this would not keep someone from hitting a proxy to gain access.

The seriously tricky part would be trying to figure out ALL of the IP space assigned within a certain geographic area.

Answer 3

Unfortunately, a lot of IPs are not static (meaning they change) so by blocking IPs, you may (potentially) block the people you want. What you CAN do, is find the ISP providers of africa (specifically their servers. They broadcast info (kind of like what you find from WHOis) and block the ones that are pinging from Africa. There are scripts that will do this (a lot of forums do this so you can tell who's from where). However, you still may block people from your site that aren't who you DON'T want. It's just the best way.

Answer 4

yes. if you are running apache web server, which there is a huge chance you are, then setupa htaccess file. This file is access by the server everytime a page is requested and allows you to custom configure what you want done.

For example, on my site, if people type in http://www.mysite.com/ it redirects them to http://mysite.com/ without the www

For you, you want to block people from a set of ip addresses,
>>>>>>

Blocking users by IP

Is there a pesky person perpetrating pain upon you? Stalking your site from the vastness of the electron void? Blockem! In your htaccess file, add the following code--changing the IPs to suit your needs--each command on one line each:

order allow,deny
deny from 123.45.6.7
deny from 012.34.5.
allow from all

You can deny access based upon IP address or an IP block. The above blocks access to the site from 123.45.6.7, and from any sub domain under the IP block 012.34.5. (012.34.5.1, 012.34.5.2, 012.34.5.3, etc.) I have yet to find a useful application of this, maybe if there is a site scraping your content you can block them, who knows.

You can also set an option for deny from all, which would of course deny everyone. You can also allow or deny by domain name rather than IP address (allow from .javascriptkit.com works for www.javascriptkit.com or virtual.javascriptkit.com, etc.)
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Here is a start to your solution:

order allow,deny
deny from .za
deny from .in
allow from all

note:
ZA SOUTH AFRICA has 7312920 ip addresses.
IN INDIA has 7155669 ip addresses.
ip2location.com has a way of getting the list, but blocking the extension is much easier.

Also Note:
PLEASE DO MORE RESEARCH to understand the .htaccess file before implementing it on a live server. It could take down your whole website if you have any typos or missing periods.

Answer 5

No, Internet is a free to acces mean of communication.