There are lots of ways to implement access controls and additional security on your hosting. I recently implemented a very restrictive but easy to manage implementation for our FreeBSD server that runs everything through Varnish. I could have placed this restriction in Apache via .HTACCESS files or global rules but placing them in Varnish they execute earlier and have less server overhead and ensure there are no caching related flaws.
Project Licenses
These works by Jeremy Pyne are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License