How-to · Intermediate · 10 minutes
How to Block Unwanted Visitors by IP
Everything you need to turn a persistent nuisance away at the door, knowing what the tool can and cannot do — the steps in order, the snag to watch, and the tip our support desk gives everybody.
Straight answer first
In a line: turn a persistent nuisance away at the door, knowing what the tool can and cannot do — a intermediate-level task that takes 10 minutes.
Below you get the exact steps, the classic snag, and a tip from the support desk. Where our platform handles a step for you, the guide says so rather than making you do the robot's work.
Written by the Hosting Seller staff · Checked 1 August 2026
Intermediate
Skill needed
5
Stages to finish
Free
Help included
Tested
On our own kit
This guide assumes no expertise at all — just a hosting account, a browser and 10 minutes of attention. Every instruction works on our platform exactly as written, and carries over to any standard cPanel host.
Rule of the road: read the snag section before you begin rather than after. It is harvested from the tickets of people who did it the other way round.
The whole job at a glance
Here is the route in full: find the offenders in the logs, add them to ip blocker, block the range when one address will not do, know where it stops working and prune the list now and then.
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking — the time it takes depends mostly on how familiar the control panel already feels. The detailed steps sit further down this page; skim the whole route once before you begin.
Where this goes wrong, and how not to
Blocking your own dynamic address while testing. The rule works exactly as written, your home connection is refused, and 'the site is down' turns out to mean 'down for me, by my own hand'. Read what you are blocking before you save it.
It is worth learning because it is not some rare edge case — it is the single most common reason this task turns into a support ticket. Knowing it up front turns the whole job from risky into routine.
The tip we hand out to everybody
For form spam, skip the address game altogether. Honeypots and validation beat blocking, because spammers change addresses far faster than anybody can type them into a list.
It costs a minute now and pays that back every time the job comes round again — which, like most hosting jobs, it certainly will.
The parts we have already done for you
We have automated the steps that do not deserve your time: certificates issue and reissue themselves, the installer handles application setup, the daily backup covers the what-if, and per-site settings live in a panel instead of a config file. The guide above covers what remains — the part that is actually about your site.
Stuck halfway through at an odd hour? That is exactly what round-the-clock human support is for — tell us where you are in this guide and we will pick it up from there.
A good platform makes every guide shorter
Every walkthrough on our how-to shelf is tested on the platform we actually run — cPanel, LiteSpeed, NVMe, one-click installs — so the instructions match your screen instead of gesturing vaguely at it.
Mailboxes on your own domain are part of the plan, never an add-on sold back to you at checkout.
- Step by step, tested exactly as printed
- The snag flagged before you reach it
- The dull steps are already automated
- People on hand at any hour if you stall
Why Hosting Seller
On every plan, as standard
Works exactly as written
Every step tested on the platform we run — no 'your host may differ' hand-waving anywhere.
Automation where it belongs
SSL, backups and installs run themselves here, so the guide covers only what is genuinely yours to do.
Scoped honestly
Turn a persistent nuisance away at the door, knowing what the tool can and cannot do is a intermediate-level task — this guide budgets 10 minutes and says which steps the platform absorbs.
5 steps, no filler
Each stage is a few minutes of steady clicking, with the fiddly parts marked as fiddly.
The undo is always named
Where a step could bite, the guide says so and tells you how to put it back again.
No jargon toll
Terms are explained where they appear or linked to the glossary — nothing assumes you already know.
First Steps
From choosing to live
- 1
Find the offenders in the logs
Access logs show the repeat patterns — scraping bursts, form-spam floods, brute-force runs — with the source address sitting right next to each one.
- 2
Add them to IP Blocker
cPanel's IP Blocker refuses single addresses or whole ranges. It is the right tool for a stubborn nuisance arriving consistently from one place.
- 3
Block the range when one address will not do
Abusers hop about within their provider's block. A CIDR range catches the neighbourhood when the same nuisance keeps returning as its own next-door neighbour.
- 4
Know where it stops working
A distributed attack ignores IP lists completely — that is what server-level protection and DDoS mitigation are for. The blocker handles nuisances, not campaigns.
- 5
Prune the list now and then
Addresses get reassigned, so last year's abuser is this year's reader. A blocklist that only ever grows will eventually shut out somebody you wanted.
In the Box
Packed with every plan
- Real people on the counter, every hour of every day
- Mailboxes that carry your own domain name
- Site migration done for you by our staff, at no charge
- Upgrades apply to the account in place, with no move between plans
- The renewal price printed on the tag matches the order price
- cPanel, the panel the rest of the trade already knows
- DDoS filtering handled out at the network edge
- NVMe SSD storage on every shelf, not just the top one
- The Softaculous installer for one-click application setup
- A backup taken daily, with restores you run yourself
Across the Counter
The questions we get asked most
Something keeps hammering my login page. Block it?
Block it by all means, but fix the category as well. Login attempt limits and two-factor make the attack pointless from any address at all. Blocking one attacker treats the symptom; hardening treats the whole class of them.
Can I block a whole country?
You can, via IP ranges in .htaccess or a firewall, and the trade-offs are real. VPNs walk straight through it, the ranges keep shifting, and legitimate people get caught — including you, the first time you travel. Save geo-blocking for genuinely regional services with a real abuse problem.
Where do the servers actually sit?
Our hosting runs from European datacentres with London at the centre, behind server-level caching that keeps cached pages quick for visitors anywhere. For most sites the build of the platform — NVMe disks, LiteSpeed, sensible numbers of accounts per machine — decides the speed far more than the postcode does.
Can I test changes somewhere safe first?
Yes — plans with staging let you clone the live site, work on the copy, then push it across when you are satisfied. It is the difference between hoping an update behaves and knowing that it does before any customer meets it.
What happens to my files if I leave?
The site and the files stay yours. Pull a full backup from the panel whenever you like, before or during cancellation. Domains remain registered in your name for the term you paid for and can move to any registrar once the standard 60-day window has passed.
Who actually runs the company?
Hosting Seller is a trading name of Bohzo Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales — a real business with a public record and terms published under English law. Looking that up is worth doing about any host before you hand over your domain.
Are backups included, and can I put one back myself?
A backup is taken daily on every plan, and the restore is yours to run from the panel in minutes — files, databases or both, at three in the morning without waiting on a ticket. Keeping your own copy offsite as well is never a bad habit, and nothing here stops you.
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