Restrict access with .htaccess and the IP Blocker

Access control is an important part of managing visitor access to your website. Visitors can be restricted from accessing your site by using the IP Blocker in your cPanel or by adding the Allow or Deny code in your .htaccess file.

This is especially useful when robots or malicious visitors from specific countries or domain addresses spam your site or place comments on your site that you do not want. The following sections will explain how to block IP’s in your .htaccess file and through the cPanel IP Blocker.

Important! If you are on a VPS or Dedicated server, you can bloack IPs globally server wide. Please click here to learn how.

Access control using your .htaccess

Access control by IP address

The Allow and Deny directives let you allow and deny access based on the IP address or host name of the originating visitors server. The syntax is as follows:

Allows IP 122.102.1.2 access to your website.

Allow from 122.102.1.2

Denys IP 25.122.6.3 access to your website.

Deny from 25.122.6.3

Adding those lines of code will prevent or give access to the user from that IP address.

Using Order to combine Allow and Deny

Order deny,allow Deny from all Allow from 203.25.45.2

This allows you to be able to Deny all visitors from accessing and at the same time allowing only certain visitors access.

Access control by Host name

You can block visitors in the .htaccess using the host name of the visitor. The following is the syntax for blocking host names from accessing your site.

Deny from unwanted-domain.com

Important! THIS IS NOT RECOMMENDED. If you use a host name in a Deny rule in the .htaccess, Apache will convert your Apache log into host names instead of IP addresses. This will remove your ability to see the logs with IP addresses. You will want to use the IP address instead of host name; unless, you want to check your site access by host name alone.

Combining deny with the IP and Host

You can combine the IP addresses and the host names together with the same syntax. Also, you can specify just a part of a domain. The following is the syntax for combining the IP and host name.

Deny from 192.168.205 Deny from unwanted-domain.com unwanted-domain-2.com Deny from domain-part

Access control using the IP Blocker

cPanel gives you the ability to block specific IP’s from viewing and accessing your website. the following is the steps to add IP addresses to your server to block them from accessing your site.

1. Login into your cPanel.
2. 

   Navigate to the Security section and click the IP Blocker icon. The following table explains what formats you can use to block Ips.

   IP formats (taken from cPanel)
   Single IP Address	10.5.3.333 (Only this IP will be blocked)
   Implied Range	10.5.3.3-10.5.3.40 (This blocks a range of IP’s that fit the parameters between IP 10.5.3.3 and 10.5.3.40)
   CIDR Format	10.5.3.3/32 (This blocks all IP’s in the 10.3.3 range from 10.3.3.00 to 10.3.3.32)
   Implied IP Address	10. Implies 10.*.*.* (blocks all IP’s starting with 10.)

    

3. 

   Enter the IP you want to block.

4. 

   Click the Add button.

5. 

   You will be directed to a success page.

   Click Go Back.

    

Now you will see the IP address in the blocked list. The IP will not be allowed to access your site.