I posted previously about recently discovering that some of our Managed Hosting customers running nopCommerce sites were experiencing high traffic with no increase in sales activity. It seemed suspicious, and for those customers using our Advanced Monitoring service, we detected an increase in CPU resource usage and a noticeable slowing down of their sites. As it turns out, the traffic was from bad bots. We contacted our customers, let them know what we saw, and helped them fix the issue.
There are many options to prevent bad bots from affecting your site, but the best and ultimate option to strive for is to prevent the bot from hitting your site in the first place. Here I discuss my preferred method.