This tutorial is deprecated in favour of The unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses
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This tutorial is about the IP address of your website on Cloudflare being blocked (normally by ISPs or authorities), if you are trying to access a site on Cloudflare and have been blocked, please see Community Tip - Access was denied Error code 1020.
Sometimes, ISPs and/or authorities in a particular country will block an IP address based on a website using that IP. Many services use shared IP addresses, and this causes an issue. Cloudflare uses shared IP addresses on all plans except Enterprise with dedicated IPs. This means that if your site happens to share an IP with another website using Cloudflare that has been blocked, yours may be too. For this reason, it is not recommended to block shared IP addresses, but some ISPs and authorities do, especially in certain countries.
Potential solutions that may change your IP address do exist, but you should be aware that the new IP address may be blocked as well.
- Upgrade your Cloudflare plan - higher Cloudflare plans often include different IP ranges
- Upgrade to the Business or Enterprise plan - this means that your IPs will be shared with less Cloudflare sites, and are less likely to be blocked, as sites on those ranges will be paying customers.
- Move your domain to a new Cloudflare account, this doesn’t guarantee new IP ranges, but it sometimes can.
Further reading:
The unintended consequences of blocking IP addresses
Tutorial Reference: CT-41
Reviewed: 08/21
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