Every visitor on your website adds load on the server that is hosting your website. Load to generate and display the visited page. Load times are important so sometimes it makes sense to block visitors that will likely never do any conversion via your website. Or you want to block a complete country from visiting your website because the visitors add no value other then a high risk of hack attempts and spam in your forum or mailbox.
Some site owners are using Akeeba Admin Tools to block visitors based on their country of origin. Akeeba is using (read: per january 2020 was using) MaxMind's GeoLite2 Country Database for this purpose, but due to a MaxMind change in policy and license, Akeeba will stop using All Geographic IP (GeoIP) features in all of their extensions.
Challenge: How do I block all visitor from a specific country?
With MaxMind closing their service to licensed customers, how can you easily block specific countries from accessing your website?
Solution: New ochSimpleFirewall GeoIP NetSets
Starting with version 1.4.0 ochSimpleFirewall has build in support for blocking visitors from a specific country. It does that by downloading a maintained GeoIP Database from https://software77.net/geo-ip/ and convert that database into blocklists per country. Currently 240(!) countries are in the converted list and as a result, ochSimpleFirewall can block visitors from any of these countries based on your configuration.
There are no remote lookups to determine the visitor's country of origin, instead the blocklists (the IP address ranges for the countries) are downloaded locally and there for there is no delay in determining where the visitor originates from. Tath make ochSimpleFirewall a valuable replacement or alternative for Akeeba Admin Tools (for blocking specific countries)!
Result: Less load and (probably) less abuse attempts / spam
Not only you, but also your converting visitors will directly benefit from blocking specific countries from putting load on your server.
Image by vishnu vijayan from Pixabay