locking IP Addresses And Why That Is Important For A Web Administrator

By Alex H D

A particular set of users may be attempting to compromise your website or your online infrastructure. There could be a whole host of reasons for this; such as to prevent you from doing business - ie. a competitor. For example, if you sell widgets online at $1 and your competitor sells them online at $1.5, he may want to take your website down, so the users buy more widgets from him.

This may also happen if your website is associated with a particular country. For example, American websites have largely been targeted by hackers from Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Russia and China for political reasons.

An IP Manager allows website owners to block a single or range of IP addresses. There could also be other reasons to block out an entire block of IP addresses from accessing your infrastructure. For example, if you are in the Securities Marketing business, you may have to comply with SEC rules if you are soliciting clients from the U.S. but you do not need to comply with these rules if you are only soliciting clients from outside the U.S. - some rules apply if you are soliciting American clients - such as filing certain disclosures etc. with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The IP Manager feature is popularly offered through many web hosting control panels and can be a great tool to prevent an entire class of people from accessing your infrastructure.

If you notice many fraudulent transactions on your e-commerce website and want to block all users from Russia from accessing your website - you could block all Russian IP addresses. For example, if you are in the business of selling guns, and it is illegal to sell guns in UK - without some licensing compliance - and you have not got the license to sell guns in the UK - you may want to block out all UK users from accessing your website, lest the UK authorities take it to mean that you are acting unlawfully.

This feature also allows you block a fully qualified domain name if the server can resolve the IP. This allows website owners to block specific IPs that may be causing abuse.

You can also use a more complicated version of this feature to direct users from a particular country to a particular sub domain. You may want to do this if you want people from a particular country to see a different website, than users from another country. For example, if you price your products differently for users from different countries. For example, if car rental companies have different cars available at different locations, they may want to direct users from a different location to their local site.

This can be done using Java or php, depending on the exact requirement of the website. PHP is great, because it causes faster loading of the website and gives the user a better experience. You can also use the htaaccess to redirect users to different subdomains. This is a very efficient way as well, because it happens directly at the apache level. You may want to consult a networking expert if you wish to undertake a modification to the htaaccess file.