Forum Moderators: open
Block non-North American Traffic for Dummies Like Me
Actually, this is related to a site on a dedicated server and involves querying a fairly large relational database for the majority of page loads. The cost of robotic visits alone can be staggering in terms of server resources required to query the size of database involved (even with a variety of caching mechanisms in place).
I regularly see 50,000 to 75,000 crawler hits a day (or more) from Google, Yahoo and Bing and that number is (or was) dwarfed by the rest of the robotic traffic on the site. It's a dynamic site so, as Lucy intimated, there is a real downside to triggering a query against a table with 7,000,000+ records in it
If the act of building a page consumes far more server resources than evaluating undesired visitors, then you can definitely afford to be granular.
deny from 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.
deny from 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95.
I use ALLOW for the US, CA and MX ranges
There's an A that I block and Don doesn't? Who knew.
Deny from 8
FWIW, y'all do this just the opposite of how I do it.
Localhost does have its uses after all.
You really need to include CA and MX in the US ranges
Your internet connection is typically linked to something like phone or TV, and that's going to be based in your own jurisdiction.
That's always been the good thing about this forum?
"There's more than one way to skin a cat".
Would it please you more if the subject line read "Block non-UK Traffic"
Many of the crossover points tended to be local ISPs, not the major providers, but I can't rule out major providers either as it's been too long to remember all the specifics.
AOL used to use the same IP ranges globally once upon a time.
There are businesses that exist just to forward goods delivered only in the US to end buyers in other countries.
First off, this subject has been discussed before but I felt that there's enough current interest in this board and on other boards here at Webmaster World alone, to warrant a fresh top-down discussion of the subject. We'll see if our moderators agree.
Can you summarize the benefits of doing so? Why would you block non-US traffic? Less traffic, less backlinks?
Because I also deal in anti-spam work, I only block certain problematic countries, ISPs and data centers. I have routine dealings with folks in Australia and New Zealand, as well as G.B. and sometimes South Africa.
If you don't sell abroad or ship abroad, there's really no reason to allow your site to be accessed abroad unless you're into sadomasochistic webmastering.
the content is not in their native language
While I only ship a couple dozen orders outside of US & Canada each year, I do sell advertising and www accessibility means human traffic, lots of it. This alone is a huge selling point to advertising.
