How to disable direct ip access on CentOs VPS

Disabling direct IP access prevents  anyone from accessing your website using the IP address.
If anyone tries to access your site using the IP address then a 403 Forbidden error will be shown.

To disable direct IP access you would have to edit the virtual host file

sudo vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/example.com.conf

Modify the above command based on your domain name and location of virtual host file.
conf.d directory is the default location of the virtual host file which I used in one of my earlier tutorials about virtual host.

Paste the code given below in your virtual host file. Replace 104.225.220.168 with your server’s IP address

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerName 104.225.220.168
    Redirect 403 /
    ErrorDocument 403 "No"
    DocumentRoot /dev/null/
    UseCanonicalName Off
    UserDir disabled
</VirtualHost>

After editing the virtual host file restart the server

sudo systemctl restart httpd

Now accessing the site via IP address would lead to 403 forbidden message being displayed