Sometime you may want to be able to “switch off” some web-application for particular reasons e.g. spamflooding or abuse of a REST service but you may want to enable information retrieval.

Most web applications like wordpress, mediawiki or other web 2.0 applications follow RFC 7231 where GET is defined as the primary method for information retrieval (RFC 7231,  4.3.1). Somewhere is defined that GET SCHOULD NOT be used for changing information (deleting, writing).

Just put something like this in your apache config (in VirtualHost):

    # deny everything but GET 
    <Location />
        <LimitExcept GET>
            Deny from all
        </LimitExcept>
    </Location>