You can keep visitors from some countries or IP addresses away from your site. Open your site under Websites in your GUDHOST account and go to Visitor access. Anyone you block sees a plain "Forbidden" page instead of your site. Changes take effect within a minute.
Block countries
Under Countries, choose who can open your site:
- Everyone: no country blocking.
- Everyone except visitors from the countries I choose: pick the countries to block, for example ones your site gets spam or attacks from.
- Only visitors from the countries I choose: everyone else is refused. Use this only if your site is meant for a few countries. Search engine crawlers that visit from abroad are refused too, so your site may drop out of search results in other countries, and you, your team and anyone helping you can only open the site and its WordPress admin from the chosen countries. To confirm, you type your domain.
Find a country by typing its name or two-letter code, tick it, then press Save. You can choose up to 50 countries. A visitor's country is worked out from their IP address, so someone using a VPN appears to come from wherever the VPN connects.
Block IP addresses
Under IP addresses, list the addresses to block, one per line, then press Save. You can enter single addresses (203.0.113.7, or IPv6 such as 2001:db8::7) or ranges in CIDR form (203.0.113.0/24, 2001:db8::/48), up to 200 entries. Very wide ranges (wider than /8 for IPv4 or /32 for IPv6) aren't accepted.
The page shows your IP address right now. If your list would block it, you're asked to confirm first, so you don't shut yourself out of your site by accident.
Remove a block
To let everyone in again, choose Everyone under Countries, or empty the IP list, and press Save. Blocking only applies to your site: your GUDHOST account always opens, so you can remove a block from anywhere.