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I've been blocking IP addresses in CPanel for a number of static and dynamic sites (none of which are WordPress), for any IP's attempting to POST code or access well known pages such as wp-admin or wp-login etc.
But will this list of blocked IP's slow my sites down as the list gets longer?
A simple solution I always find myself recommending. Use Cloudflare's services and you can block the spammers before they even hit your server so it won't cause any speed issues. You can block entire countries if you wanted to as well.
I know it isn't answer specifically for Cpanel but it will work alot better.
It will not, or at least it makes sense to block them. Just compare: 1) blocking at the firewall level is close to the the kernel, therefore very fast 2) allowing the attacker to pass to the site involves apache, perhaps php and 404 error generation. Too much CPU and network resources.
If you have have millions IPs to block there, then it will slow down the server, but on the other hand, to generate several errors (e.g. wp-admin, wp-login, xmlrps etc) per each IP for the same millions of IPs... It worth to block.
Also, fail2ban is quite helpful: I believe it can remove from the black list IPs which did not tried to attack for certain period of time.
