IP Blocker in CPanel

I have hosting space via Hostgator. Over the years, for one of my sites that seemed to attract every bot on the planet, I have added IP addresses for the cpanel IP Blocker to deny access to. There are now about 28,000 of them, by my rough count. It turns out, that I may be blocking a number of countries that I now would like to allow access to due to a new business development. I asked hostgator support if there was a way to delete all of the blocked IP's (to start fresh) and they came back and said that I would have to delete them one by one. This could take a loooong time, of course.

Any suggestions as to how I can remove these IP addresses from the IP Blocker in cpanel?

 

The IPs are in the /home/youraccountname/public_html/.htaccess file.
Like:
===
deny from 1.1.1.1
deny from 1.2.2.2
etc
===

You can remove them from this file. Take care not to delete other rules. Also, make a backup of the file first.

 

Wow, thanks for your help! I will check that out!

 

After you remove all those IPs, put this at the very top of your site's index page (provided your index page is index.php). It will bounce every bad bot before it has a chance to crawl your site:

<?php
// ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Banned IP Addresses and Bots - Redirects banned visitors who make it past the .htaccess and or robots.txt files to an URL.
// The $banned_ip_addresses array can contain both full and partial IP addresses, i.e. Full = 123.456.789.101, Partial = 123.456.789. or 123.456. or 123.
// Use partial IP addresses to include all IP addresses that begin with a partial IP addresses. The partial IP addresses must end with a period.
// The $banned_bots, $banned_unknown_bots, and $good_bots arrays should contain keyword strings found within the User Agent string.
// The $banned_unknown_bots array is used to identify unknown robots (identified by 'bot' followed by a space or one of the following characters _+:,.;/\-).
// The $good_bots array contains keyword strings used as exemptions when checking for $banned_unknown_bots. If you do not want to utilize the $good_bots array such as
// $good_bots = array(), then you must remove the the keywords strings 'bot.','bot/','bot-' from the $banned_unknown_bots array or else the good bots will also be banned.
$banned_ip_addresses = array('');
$banned_bots = array('.ru', 'AhrefsBot', 'crawl', 'crawler', 'DotBot', 'linkdex', 'majestic', 'meanpath', 'PageAnalyzer', 'robot', 'rogerbot', 'semalt', 'SeznamBot', 'spider');
$banned_unknown_bots = array('bot ', 'bot_', 'bot+', 'bot:', 'bot,', 'bot;', 'bot\\', 'bot.', 'bot/', 'bot-');
$good_bots = array('Google', 'Googlebot', 'MSN', 'bing', 'bingbot', 'Slurp', 'Yahoo', 'DuckDuck', 'STBot', 'Mediapartners-Google', 'ia_archiver');
$banned_redirect_url = 'https://google.com';
// Visitor's IP address and Browser (User Agent)
$ip_address = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$browser = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
// Declared Temporary Variables
$ipfound = $piece = $botfound = $gbotfound = $ubotfound = '';
// Checks for Banned IP Addresses and Bots
if ($banned_redirect_url != '') {
    // Checks for Banned IP Address
    if (!empty($banned_ip_addresses)) {
        if (in_array($ip_address, $banned_ip_addresses)) {
            $ipfound = 'found';
        }
        if ($ipfound != 'found') {
            $ip_pieces = explode('.', $ip_address);
            foreach ($ip_pieces as $value) {
                $piece = $piece . $value . '.';
                if (in_array($piece, $banned_ip_addresses)) {
                    $ipfound = 'found';
                    break;
                }
            }
        }
        if ($ipfound == 'found') {
            header("location: $banned_redirect_url");
            exit();
        }
    }
    // Checks for Banned Bots
    if (!empty($banned_bots)) {
        foreach ($banned_bots as $bbvalue) {
            $pos1 = stripos($browser, $bbvalue);
            if ($pos1 !== false) {
                $botfound = 'found';
                break;
            }
        }
        if ($botfound == 'found') {
            header("location: $banned_redirect_url");
            exit();
        }
    }
    // Checks for Banned Unknown Bots
    if (!empty($good_bots)) {
        foreach ($good_bots as $gbvalue) {
            $pos2 = stripos($browser, $gbvalue);
            if ($pos2 !== false) {
                $gbotfound = 'found';
                break;
            }
        }
    }
    if ($gbotfound != 'found') {
        if (!empty($banned_unknown_bots)) {
            foreach ($banned_unknown_bots as $bubvalue) {
                $pos3 = stripos($browser, $bubvalue);
                if ($pos3 !== false) {
                    $ubotfound = 'found';
                    break;
                }
            }
            if ($ubotfound == 'found') {
                header("location: $banned_redirect_url");
                exit();
            }
        }
    }
}
// ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
?>

Code (markup):

 

Hi @qwikad.com and thanks. Sounds like some good code to have there!