Sometimes you need to block a certain IP address, a group of addresses or certain hosts from accessing your Joomla website. Reasons may include:
- It's a hacking attempt coming from that IP
- Someone is scraping content from your website
- A brute-force attack (in most cases a DoS - Denial of Service - attack is originated from that IP (there are too many requests coming from a particular IP
- Someone continuously spamming your website
- Some content from your site (images, media files) are hotlinked from your website.
The solution is simple, but is advised to apply first other tools to stop these bad guys - overuse of this tip can slow down your site considerably, use it ony if you don't have anything else - or you are in hurry to stop an ongoing attack.