In this tutorial I’ll explain how you can block any IP address, or a range of IP addresses, from accessing your site using an .htaccess file.

What is an .htaccess file

I previously wrote a post demonstrating how to remove .php, .html, .htm extensions with .htaccess. In that post I explain what is an .htaccess file. Go and read that post if you don’t know what an .htaccess file is.

How to block an IP address

Open up the .htaccess file you want to change, and insert the following code:

order allow,deny
deny from 10.145.66.6
deny from 128.134.51.
allow from all

Change the IP addresses to match your IP address that you want to block. The first deny, blocks access to IP address 10.145.66.6 and the second deny blocks a range of IP addresses from 128.134.51.0 to 128.134.51.255. The last line is to allow all other IP addresses to view that directory (remember, .htaccess files affects that directory and the subdirectories).

Block users by referrers

Instead of blocking individual IP addresses, you can block users originating from a particular domain. A simple application of this, is when you have referrers from a website but there’s no link on it, the owner of the website just  hotlinks to your files, stealing your bandwidth. Insert the following code:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blockedsite\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F]

This code will block the domain blockedsite.com. The backslash (\) is used to allow the period be used as one, instead of matching a single character (read more on regular expressions). The [NC] is used to make the domain case insensitive. The last line specifies what action to be performed when a match is found. In this case, fail the request (403 Forbidden error).

It is also possible to block several referrers. You just have to add [OR] at the end of all the referrers but the last one. Here is an example:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blockedsite1\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blockedsite2\.com [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} blockedsite2\.com
RewriteRule .* - [F]

Conclusion

This is a very easy way of blocking IP addresses and referrers. Most cPanels will have this feature installed which will allow you to block IP addresses from within the panel, instead of altering the .htaccess file yourself. In case you don’t have, or can’t find, this feature, today you learned how to do it!

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