A few questions for you...
- How familiar are you with the logs on your server?
- Do you know how to block IPs on your server?
- Do you know where this competitor is physically located?
- Are you willing to take a chance or being wrong?
The reason I ask these questions is that there is a way and from the questions you can probably see where I'm going...
If you go through the logs and find that one IP Address is hitting tons of pages, you can blacklist that IP from hitting you at all. But before you do that, you should check to see that the offending IP is in the same geographic area as the competitor that you want to block. You will have to check the IP against a site like (ip2location)-(c0m) to be certain that it is in the right place.
Once you have a site that is banging against your server, is located in the right geographical area, you'll have to go and blacklist it on your server. Once you do that, you might have won. Or you might have to do it on an ongoing basis if they have a dynamic IP instead of static. All they'd have to do is reboot their modem to receive a new IP.
Another option you might have is to create an entry in your .htaccess that looks kinda link this:
Code:
SetEnvIf REMOTE_ADDR 192.12.131.1 REDIR="redir"
RewriteCond %{REDIR} redir
RewriteRule ^/$ /about_my_site.html
You'd have to create a page that either told them that they were blocked or simply redirect it to a page that doesn't exist. That would show them a 404 and they might think you went out of business.
Those are your options as I see them. I hope this helps.
