Block user IP's with .htaccess or PHP?

Question

From a performance only view, which would be the best way to block 30 IP addresses?

A) .htaccess file

or

B) PHP code in the file

Answer 1

If you are administrator of your server, I would use none of those, and would ban the IPs at the firewall level -- this way, nor Apache nor Apache+PHP will have to work.

If you're not admin ; well, .htaccess means only Apache, and no PHP to load/compile/execute ; I'm guessing Apache alone (i.e. .htaccess) should require less resources than Apache+PHP.

Another way of seing things is maintenance : if you need to add/delete IPs addresses from that list, what would the easiest way be ?
(In that case, I would generally bet for some PHP code...)