In my last blog post, I discussed how you can use CloudFlare to prevent bad bots from getting to your site. But, what happens if the bad traffic still remembers your old IP number for the original web server and the bots still get through.
Recently we had one of our Managed Hosting customers experience this very problem. We helped find a solution to this issue.
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.
We recently discovered that a few of our customers running nopCommerce e-commerce sites were experiencing high traffic. You usually would automatically think it’s a great thing, however, the customers were not seeing any increase in sales activity. So something was wrong. Long story short, after investigating, the high traffic was from bad bots.
We discovered this issue when the Advanced Monitoring tool attached to one of our Managed Hosting customer’s site alerted us about an increase in CPU resource usage. On our Managed Hosting system, we don’t generally meter our customer’s bandwidth usage, but we will notice an increase in server resource usage. These bots were so pervasive that it caused the customer’s CPU usage to increase dramatically, causing a noticeable slowdown of their site.
There are many options to prevent bad bots from affecting your site performance and I’ll cover my preferred solution in a future post.
Our customers were thankful when we notified them as to what was happening with the high bot traffic activity. We provided assistance to help our customers deal with the issue.
That got me thinking about what would have happened if the customer was on a giant public cloud, like Azure or Amazon. On those public cloud platforms, you would be paying for all the in/out traffic you use. So, if you got hit with some nasty bots, you’d be on the hook for paying for the bandwidth. Since customers are paying for bandwidth usage, is there incentive for the giant clouds to help identify issues like bots? If you’ve ever dealt with this issue on Azure or Amazon, I’d be curious to hear about your experience.
For Everleap, since we include bandwidth as part of our flat monthly hosting fees, we do what we can to monitor our bandwidth usage as a whole and we try to actively look for these types of suspicious activities. We pride ourselves in being proactive to help our customers and that is the kind of service that our customers should expect from us.
Learn more about Everleap Managed Hosting services.