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 deny manager 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 deny manager.
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
You can combine a Deny and an Allow directive in one spot using Order. See the following code example.
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 Deny Manager
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.
- Login into your cPanel.
Navigate to the Security setion and click IP Deny Manager. 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) |
|---|
| 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) |
|---|
| Implied Range |
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) |
|---|
| CIDR Format |
10. Implies 10.*.*.* (blocks all IP's starting with 10.) |
|---|
Type the IP you want to block.
Click Add.
You will be directed to a success page.
Click back.
Now you will see the IP address in the list of current IP's that are blocked and the IP will not be allowed to access your site.
