Question – Can Blogger or Wordpress.com block traffic based on Country
If you’ve been on the web for any amount of time, you realize that you can get traffic form a myriad of sources. In general, we want as much traffic as possible, but there are some instances where we might only want to get traffic from a certain set of countries or possibly even exclude entire blocks of countries from accessing your site or blog.
The best way (although not bullet proof by any means) is to block traffic based on an IP Address. How can I do that? you ask…
For site owners running on linux based platforms, there is a great .htaccess hack that will allow you to block ranges of IP Addresses based on the host country. Take a look the service offered by Block a Country for a great and easy tutorial to implementing a host country block for Linux based sites. nihars world has a great summary oh using Block a Country as well you might want to check out.
Windows based sites are a bit trickier and you might need to subscribe to a service like the one offered by MaxMind which provides a subscription based model to access City, ZIP, Host Country, State, etc. for each request to your site. Once you have the subscription to the Maxmind service, you can either implement your own database of IPs and update that regularly or you can use their web service based model.
The question I have out there for everyone is this:
If you are using a service like Wordpress.com or Blogger (Blogspot) – how can you block traffic based on Country – is there anyway that can’t be accomplished? I was thinking that possibly you could do a .js include that might redirect the user, but this wouldn’t help for any hotlinked images or if the user had javascript disabled. Any ideas???
