If you find that you are unable to:
- open your website – it just times out or takes too long to respond
- connect to webmail, FTP or cPanel – it just times out or takes too long to respond
- send or receive an email (your email software says it can’t connect to the server)
It is most likely that your internet connection’s external/public IP address has been blocked for some reason.
There are some other reasons you might see a 403 error, and these are mentioned later in this article.
How to unblock your IP address from the firewall
You can get your IP address unblocked easily from within your Client Area.
- Within your Hostko Client area – click on the menu Support > Unban IP.
- You’ll see the list of your hosting packages and the lock icon next to them. Click the lock icon and type your current IP address that you are connecting from, and the Check button. You can easily find out your external/public IP address by visiting moj-ip.si
- If the given IP address has been blocked, this check will unblock you (subject to the conditions below).
About our IP address blocking policies
To protect our service from abuse, the following events will lead to your IP address being blocked. Usually, this is only temporary (usually 30 minutes), but it may become permanent if you are temporarily blocked more than 10 times within a 24 hour period. Common reasons for your IP address becoming blocked include (in order of popularity):
- Using an incorrect username/password combination into cPanel/WHM, FTP, Webmail, SSH more than 10 times in a few minutes.
- Using an incorrect email address/password more than 10 times in a few minutes into webmail. If you have misconfigured Outlook, Mail or other email software on your PC or Mobile device to automatically fetch email using the wrong email address/password combination, this will also cause your IP address to be blocked.
- Using an incorrect username/password more than 5 times a few minutes into a password-protected web page.
- Accessing a page using URL parameters that have been blocked by Mod Security more than 50 times in a few minutes.
Mod Security has blocked access to the page
If you have just added new scripts/modules/plug-ins to your website, it is also possible that mod_security might be triggered. While this is rare, if you experience a series of 403 forbidden errors and then find yourself unable to connect, mod_security has likely logged security events leading to your IP being blocked temporarily.