locking IPs and Visitors by Country
If you inspect your web traffic, you may have noticed a surprising number of visitors from countries such as China, Russia, Poland, India and Brazil. Maybe your website only offers local information about your small town in Louisiana. Can that many people from overseas can be interested in your local news?
The answers hides in your website's error logs. There, you will see that many of these visitors are trying to access files and folders that do not exist, hoping to hack into your site, perhaps to turn your server into a spamming zombie.
Some webmasters decide to block all traffic from a number of handpicked countries, sacrificing the few legitimate visitors from China who were looking at your site because they planned to fly in next week to catch a movie at the community hall.
There are several ways to deny traffic from a particular country. To my knowledge, all these methods rely on matching the visitor's IP address to some kind of IP geolocation table.
None of the solutions are perfect: determined visitors will be able to access your site through proxies.
