If you are unable to access your website, emails and cPanel at the same time, but other websites are working, this is often because the server’s firewall has blocked your IP address. The firewall treats too many failed login attempts as a brute-force attack and temporarily blocks the IP address from which they originated.

How can it be identified?

• The website, webmail and cPanel are not loading, displaying a timeout or an ‘Unable to establish a connection’ error.
• The email client is unable to connect to the server.
• Other websites open without any problems.
• The surest sign is this: if you switch off Wi-Fi on your phone and open the website using your mobile data, it will work. In this case, it is almost certain that the IP address of your office or home internet connection has been blocked.

Before you suspect that your site has been blocked, check the portal.awh.hu/serverstatus.php page to see if there are any known issues or ongoing maintenance on the server. Our free website availability checker retrieves your website not only from your browser but also from several independent servers. If the website loads from these locations but not from your own, the server is working and your IP address has probably been blocked; if it cannot be accessed from anywhere, the fault does not lie with your connection, in which case please open a ticket via the client portal.

What causes the ban?

The most common causes:

• Old password on a device: after a password change, a phone, tablet or email client attempts to log in using the old password every minute, which triggers a lockout within a few minutes.
• A mistyped password entered multiple times in cPanel, webmail or the FTP program.
• A program with incorrect settings, such as an FTP client or backup software attempting to log in with an incorrect username.
• Shared IP address: in an office, everyone usually accesses the internet via the same public IP address, so a single colleague’s incorrectly configured device could block the entire office.

What should you do?

1. Find out your public IP address, for example by searching for ‘what is my IP address’ on Google (without using mobile data, whilst on a blocked network).
2. Open a support ticket on the client portal (if you cannot access it from the blocked network, use your mobile data connection) and include your IP address and the domain name of your hosting account.
3. Our colleagues will lift the block and check the log to see which service and which account triggered it, so that we can tell you what needs to be fixed.

How can this be prevented?

• After changing your password, update it on all devices (mobile phone, tablet, laptop, email client) or temporarily deactivate the account on that device.
• Use a password manager so you don’t have to keep guessing.
• Enable two-factor authentication in cPanel.
• There is a separate article on changing your cPanel password.