SiteHost

Blocked IP Addresses

If you've landed here after seeing an "Access Forbidden" message while trying to visit a website, it looks like your IP address has been temporarily blocked by our automated protection. This page explains why that happens and what to do next.

What Happened?

SiteHost runs automated abuse detection across every server on our network. It watches incoming web traffic continuously, looking for the signatures of abuse rather than a genuine visitor. To protect the system we can't publish exactly what it looks for, but some examples are:

  • The volume and rate of requests, when there's far more traffic arriving far faster than a person browsing a site would ever generate.
  • Request patterns such as walking through URLs in sequence, and probing for known vulnerabilities.
  • Behavioural giveaways like missing or spoofed browser details, or ignoring cookies - traits of a script rather than a browser.
  • The reputation of the address itself. That covers addresses we've already caught misbehaving elsewhere on our network, plus lists shared between hosting providers worldwide.

When an address crosses the threshold it's blocked at our network level, before the request ever reaches the website. At any given moment we're holding a list of tens of thousands of flagged addresses.

Two things are worth knowing:

  • The block applies to an IP address, not to you and not to the website. The site itself is online and serving everyone else normally, and there's nothing wrong with its hosting, billing or configuration.
  • Blocks are temporary. They expire on their own, usually after about four hours, and we only re-apply them if the behaviour continues.

Why are you, a real visitor, getting blocked?

No detection system is perfect, and there are a few common ways a legitimate visitor gets caught:

  • Your address is shared with other people. Offices, schools, apartment buildings and many mobile networks put hundreds or thousands of users behind a single public address, so one badly behaved person or device affects everyone sharing it.
  • You're on a VPN or a corporate proxy. These pool a lot of users onto a handful of addresses, and the same services are popular with bot operators.
  • Something on your network is compromised. Malware on any machine sharing your connection can generate abusive traffic without you knowing about it.
  • You're running automated tools. SEO crawlers, scrapers, link checkers, uptime monitors, security scanners, or a misconfigured plugin or API integration can all look like an attack from the outside.
  • You're coming from a cloud or hosting range. Traffic from cloud providers is overwhelmingly automated, so those ranges get closer scrutiny than residential connections.
  • You've been refreshing heavily. Hammering reload on a slow-loading page can be enough on its own to trip a rate limit.

What Can You Do?

Most blocks clear by themselves within a few hours, so the simplest option is to wait and try again later. If you need access sooner, or the block keeps coming back, get in touch and we'll look into it.

Email Us Your Information

Email support@sitehost.nz and include as much of the following as you can:

  1. Your IP address. See Finding Your IP Address below. Include both your IPv4 and IPv6 addresses if you have both, as the block could be on either one.
  2. What you were trying to reach. The website address or the full URL. If you know the server name or the server's IP address, include those too.
  3. When it happened. The date and time, along with your time zone, so we can find the exact requests in our logs.
  4. What you were doing at the time. Ordinary browsing, uploading files, running a deployment, calling an API, or something automated.
  5. What kind of connection you're on. Home, office, mobile data, or via a VPN. This matters most when the address is shared with other people.
  6. A screenshot of the page you're seeing, or the exact wording of the error.

The more of this you can give us up front, the faster we can trace what triggered the block and clear it. We appreciate your patience while we investigate.

Finding Your IP Address

Search for "what is my IP address" in your browser, or visit a lookup service such as ifconfig.co. Either will show you the public address that the rest of the internet sees you on.

Please don't send us an address that begins with 192.168., 10., or 172.16. to 172.31.. Those are private addresses used inside your own network, and they won't help us identify you.

Things to Try

  • Stop refreshing the page. Continuing to send requests from a blocked address can extend the block.
  • Try a different connection, such as your phone's mobile data. If the site loads there, the block is likely tied to your original address, which is useful for us to know.
  • Check your own tooling if you manage the site or run anything automated against it. A runaway cron job, plugin or crawler is a common culprit, and it'll keep re-triggering the block until it's stopped.

Website Owners

If visitors or customers are reporting this page on a site you host with us, open a ticket through the Control Panel with the affected IP addresses and roughly when they were blocked. We can review what the traffic from those addresses was actually doing, and lift the block if it turns out to be a false positive.

It also helps to tell us in advance about any legitimate automation you run against your own sites, such as uptime monitors, deployment pipelines, backup or migration tools, staging syncs, or API integrations, along with the addresses they run from, so we can take them into account.

Further Reading

Our blog covers the scale of the problem and how our protection works in more detail: