Hi! Today I had a very strange issue - the site won't load up until I will turn on the VPN. Is this issue comes from the host or it's something else?
I'm from Russia and I do understand that a lot of companies and just people on the internet is blocking access for my region, because of obvious political issues, that I'm not wanna talk about on the site about modding the game from early 2000's.... But I still want to know - is it just an error or I just now should always use VPN?

In the past, we've had a lot of spammers and bots coming from Russian ISPs, so the IPs are blocked in large ranges. So I would indeed advise you to use a VPN. This happened way way way WAY before the current political climate btw, so probably a decade or more.

Well if it happened long time ago - then why now doing this? I could access the site without VPN perfectly fine just a week ago...
I guess there are some things that won't be answered right now or directly. Still - thank you for a bit of information

If you could access it a week ago then it's likely that your IP is dynamic and switched to one that is previously blocked. It takes a lot of effort to figure out which specific IPs are spamming, etc, hence why I tend to block in large ranges.

Just making a quick update: Now it works fine without VPN! It's a bless for me personally, thanks