How to Block Entire Countries from Accessing Your Website

If you run a website, then by default it is accessible to the whole planet.

Many websites are simply not relevant to people in other countries. So, you should not expect significant traffic from them as a matter of course.

If you have a local bookstore and your primary market is local people walking into your store, then there is no need to let any other countries index or waste bandwidth on your server. The same might be true of a carwash, or babysitters, or lawn mowing.

If you run a personal or even private website, such as a family blog, you may want to highly restrict traffic by default.

Here is a screenshot of Awstats telling me that China is responsible for the second-largest volume of traffic to a certain web forum I manage. This is just for January 2015.

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by Zack Wallace via SitePoint