Since a development or staging environment is meant for testing, the general public shouldn’t be able to access it. Let’s discuss more how you can block and unblock a site in terms of general access.

Overview

So, how do you restrict access to your dev or staging website? The answer is password protection — used as a way to block a site or unblock a site for visitors. When you enable password protection, people can’t view the website unless they enter a username and password.

In such a scenario, even search engines won’t be able to crawl the website.
And on top of keeping your dev or staging website out of the public (and crawlers’) eye, password protection offers several benefits, including securing your website from hackers.

If you’re new to Nexcess or have run into issues trying to enable or disable passwords, this guide is for you. We’ll walk you through how to block and unblock a site step by step.

Step by step instructions

Log in to my.nexcess.net.
On the left-hand menu, go to Plans.
Select the plan name, then navigate to the Plan dashboard.
Next, select the three dots icon on the far right, and then go to the Site dashboard.
The Management tab will appear on the left vertical menu.
From there, you can view the Password Protection option.
Once there, click the Enable button.

There you have it. Following the steps above, you’ve just enabled password protection for your staging website. Your website can now only be accessed by specific users.

Using the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and Secure Shell (SSH), you can also manually block a site or a specific page.

Unblock a site

Use the same process to unblock a site, but instead of enabling password protection at the end of the process, you’ll disable password protection to unblock the site.

Password protection for a development environment

Let’s review how to unblock and block a site in a dev environment. For dev sites, Nexcess auto-generates password protection, so password protection is enabled by default. As a result, the site is blocked.

The process for enabling/disabling password protection for a dev site is the same as for staging. The only difference is that password protection in enabled by default for dev sites.