Help - How to block all countries except SA from access to my site.

SweetFennyAdams

SweetFennyAdams

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I host a small phpBB forum in the USA with hostgator.com.

The forum has about 2500 active members and is steadily growing.
Over the last week the forum directory has been timing out and the hosts blame malicious traffic.
They claim to have mitigated the malicious traffic with some firewall, but it's effectively blocking 99% of our legitimate traffic from SA.

When I complain they merely ask me to provide my current IP and whitelist it. This isn't a fix as dynamic IP screws up every time I restart my machine or switch devices. This is also happening to all our users.

Yesterday the host said they'd migrate the hosting to new faster server which they claimed would handle the traffic. This has also failed.

I'm getting annoyed of no speedy or concrete resolution to this issue. All I get are white screens and 500 server errors visiting the domain, and standard support ticket replies from their IT dept, telling me they will monitor and report back in 8 hours. This has been going on for a week.

This makes me suspect the host might be hoodwinking me and setting me up to offer a more expensive dedicated hosting package to make the problems 'go away' (typical problem --> reaction ---> solution propaganda marketing move). They are a massive company and should have capacity to fix these issues as our forum is tiny in comparison to others out there.

Is there a httaccess or php method to simply block all incoming traffic to my site from outside our borders, eliminating the malicious pings? Our site is for SA viewers exclusively.

Has anyone been trough these so called 'attacks' and found a way around them?
 
Last edited:
Not going to answer your question but a word on advice with Hostgator, they all great when they work but as soon as you start asking for their help, complaining about something you get nowhere. I gave up on them many years ago.
 
Restrict access to your site like they restrict access to us for hbo.com like we even care.
 
Hostgator has been a brilliant company for many, many years now. Their support is fantastic. I have been with them the better part of almost 9 years now. Hostgator is a large hosting company and they currently host just about 9% of the Internet's websites on their datacenters.

I also had a number of Ddos attacks on a few websites hosted with them, and they were pretty much effective in resolving the problems and ensure security, although it did take a couple of days, which is normal.

You need to speak to them again and get the correct information from them. I highly doubt that there will be any kind of Ddos attack on your website and Hostgator will tell you to upgrade to a bigger server. I suspect that the traffic to your server may cause an overload - or perhaps you are depleting your nodes limits. That may rather be the reason why they have informed you that you need to upgrade to a VPS or Dedi server.

Try to chat to them again. Try to send their tech department a ticket and don't make use of the online support / chat system. Those on standby there don't always have access to the systems and some, I have found, aren't always that bright.
 
Its a tad tedious, but what you can do if you have logaholic in your cpanel is:

Log into logaholic for your site, click view details for the domain/subdomain, click visitor details, then choose one of the tabs there to grab IP addresses from, it will give IP Address as well as country.

You can then go to IP deny manager under security in Cpanel, then add an entire range to block.

Formats available are:

10.5.3.333 Single IP

10.5.3.3-10.5.3.40 Range

10.5.3.5-40 Implied Range

10.5.3.3/32 CIDR Format

10. Implies 10.*.*.*

Like I said though, its a tad tedious, but blocking entire ranges would probably help quite a bit.
 
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