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Title: Bots are out of control
Date: March 19, 2026

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  I had my website up for about 48 hours. In that time, the
bandwidth for my VPS's shared pool went from 0.5GB used, to
1.8GB used. Looking at the logs showed it was pretty much
all bots hammering my site, especially Bytedance and Yandex
who would hit nginx hard enough trigger fail2ban mulitple
times in a row. It's maddening just how bad crawlers and
LLMs have become.

  Admittedly, the worst are still the security/exploit bots
that love sending binary and malformed packets at my site
in hopes I might have enabled WebDAV or set up WordPress in
the last few nanoseconds since their previous attempt. They
actually trigger fail2ban even more than the stupid LLMs.
It's not even just the script kiddy wannabes, but the ones
supposedly tied to legit security companies, which makes it
even more annoying.

  I shut down nginx again after that, and plan on keeping
it offline for a little while longer. If it were Searx or
some other open-source crawler that benefits the community,
I wouldn't be so miffed, but these things hammer sites hard
and repeatedly. It's not worth allowing them free-reign to
do what they want with your server.

  At some point, it might be better to just throw in the
towel on running my own VPS and switch to relying on public
hosts like Neocities or Nekoweb, as long as I can use my
own domain name with them. Either that, of if we're lucky,
the AI bubble with burst so hard that it bankrupts a number
of major tech companies all at once. We'd need a nat20 for
that to happen, though.

  Until then, best to play it by ear, I guess.

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