Blocking specific countries from your site

[tbworld]

In most large companies we use hardware firewalls to handle this. I know this is not useful information for most, but maybe an explanation on why there is not more sophisticated tools for the small guy. if on a shared server the best you can probably do is some sort of cpanel option, if they have it. if not then set some kind of IP filtering on vbulletin directories like ht-access. Of course it can be done in vbulletin, but this really isn't desired -- you don't really want them to get that far in. If the program is inefficient it can add significant server load and maybe even killing the server as @snake said.

I serve my daughters board over FIOS connection (which gets hammered) and I use a separate firewall for her server. You just need to purchase a descent enough firewall to handle this kind of option. Now I just monitor the IP's that get through to the server using any of the many server tools for doing this. I tried not to reinvent the wheel here.

If your a dedicated server, then there are some good solutions. I agree with @Snake.