First off, let me apologise for being AWOL lately. I’ve been dealing with a little bit of Internet drama that I feared was going to be the end of my little blog here. Last month a bot from IP address 198.199.124.41 tried to access a page on my blog and encountered a ‘404 Not Found’ error. It was unsuccessful, so it tried again and again and again and again…25,209,286 times. Yea, that was 25+ million times. Eating up 24,987,720 Kbytes of data and netting me a £417.82 bill for bandwidth overage from my provider. That’s $656.10!
Yeah fuck you and your bot Digital Ocean, Inc. of 270 Lafayette St Ny, NY 10012. That’s essentially my blog’s budget for the next five years. I am, of course, negotiating with my hosting company to try and reduce the cost since they are apparently charging me roughly 50X as much per MB for over use as regular use, (Seems a little high doesn’t it?) but so far no luck. I feel like I’ve been robbed twice. First by the bot (and how futile is it to get angry at a damned bot?) and then by the hosting companies predatory overage charges. I imagine this one is going to Trading Standards before it’s over with.
So, here’s what I learned out of all of this. Honeytraps are important. Sad but true. I didn’t even know what one was before this. We (i.e. my blog, my husband’s computer skills) followed Michael Langley‘s directions on how to set one up. Apparently the idea is to create a ‘forbidden’ area that lures the bot and allows it to sneak in, gives it some trash data so it thinks it has done it’s job, logs it’s IP address and summarily blocks it. The list of blocked bots grows at a surprising rate after that.
I knew there was a lot of bot traffic on here by the difference between the hit counter (which discounts bots somehow) and the unmitigated number of hits a day. But it never occurred to me that they could cause me any real harm. Imagine my surprise. So, here’s my advice people. Get yourself protected. Especially if, like me, you don’t understand all that much of what make the whole system function.