What You Need To Know About IP Blocking

The internet, to most individuals, may appear to be a terrifying and perplexing wilderness. Even the most perplexing mathematical equations can be understood with a little explanation, so there’s no need to be concerned. Let’s begin with what an IP address is, the term “IP” stands for Internet Protocol, while the word “address” refers to a unique number assigned to each internet device. Our desktop computers, mobile phones, and consoles require IP addresses to interact with the internet by sending data from an IP address and receiving data on the same IP address whether we’re checking emails or shopping online.

Every IP address is distinct, consider it a unique personal identification tag. Even by only restarting your home broadband router, your IP address may change upon starting up again (depends on your broadband provider, especially for USA broadband providers). If you log onto the hotel’s Wi-Fi with your phone and change to use your own data after, you will see your IP address changing.

What Is IP Blocking?

As you probably know, there are around 5 billion users on the internet, some of whom are malicious. So, it is critical to safeguard yourself and others from any potential external risks, by trying as hard as possible to block out malicious users. Fortunately there a lot of ways to detect malicious users, and one of the main methods is called IP blocking, this method can allow a service to block your IP based on whatever criteria they set (geolocation, particular activies, etc…), however because of this, it may block a genuine person from visiting a website.

Why Do We Need IP Blocking Services?

We mentioned before the one of the reason for IP blocking, but there are many other specific reasons to possibly IP block someone other than “malicious users”.

Site Geofence

Have you noticed that certain sites like bet365 or some other gambling sites won't let you access the site unless you are from certain countries? This is the result of using IP blocking to geofence their sites to only allow certain countries and block the rest due to legal reasons.

Spam & Bots

Some online stores, such as designer or hypebeast/streetwear companies, often experience massive traffic spikes by bots trying to purchase their products in bulks or in smaller quantities but to the same address. These websites may also receive numerous spam comments that may result in a slow site and possibly ruining the experience of legitimate customers just trying to buy something for themselves. So these websites may flag certain activies on the site as bot like and end up banning your IP when its pretty confident that you might be a bot. For example to access MediaMarkt you will need a German IP to shop on the site, as for them it wouldn't make sense to them why someone would be buying electronics from Germany to another country unless they are maybe trying to resell a product.

Payment Security

Online payments is how many malicious users try cashout stolen credit/debit cards for goods and etc, most of the time the customers find out of the fraudulent transactions and contact their bank to make chargebacks, but the business that was part of the transaction will lose the money, product and possibly time to handle a chargeback case so most businesses to minimize the risk of a chargeback will always have a flagging system that won't let you pay even if your card details are correct and possibly block your IP from purchasing. You may have noticed that paying for items online when connected to public wifi a lot of times won't let you login to their app or even pay with your card details as they don't want to risk anything.

Why Is My IP Blocked?

As we have explained above there are many ways different sites may detect malicious users and etc, so we made a list of the main reasons most people get IP blocked:

You are in a public wifi or shared wifi and someone might have done some dodgy activity on it to flag the IP address.
The site may only allow you to view the content if you are from certain countries.
Your own connection could have a firewall blocking you from accessing certain sites.
The site could be only allowing access to their site via home or mobile IP addresses (this is mostly for banks).

How could we possibly help?

IP blocking is done mainly for safety reasons, but sometimes there might be cases where you need access to the site no matter what. To stop being blocked by a website your solution might just have to be changing your IP, but a lot of times even that won’t work as you could be geoblocked or something, so you could change your IP address with the use of a proxy. SpeedProxies offers proxies that are perfect for speed and privacy so you can always visit the site you want without noticing any restriction at an affordable price per proxy.