On Wed, Jan 21, 2026 at 9:32 AM Bigsy Bohr <[email protected]> wrote: > > On 2026-01-20, Jeffrey Walton <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 3:53 PM Greg Wooledge <[email protected]> wrote: > >> > >> On Tue, Jan 20, 2026 at 15:35:10 -0500, Davidson wrote: > >> > Why not > >> > > >> > 402 Payment Required > >> > > >> > instead, with instructions on how pay for the privilege of getting on > >> > a whitelist? > >> > >> For one thing, I know they're never going to pay me. > >> > >> For another, I'm not doing this because I hate AI or whatever. I'm > >> doing it for *survival*. The host that my wiki runs on *cannot* > >> process those thousands of useless dynamic page requests. If I were > >> to say "hey, pay me X dollars, and you can send as many page diff > >> requests as you want", I would be making a promise of services I cannot > >> deliver. > > > > ++. > > > > The Crypto++ project got kicked off of GoDaddy hosting because of > > virtual CPU usage. Our CPU usage would also affect co-located sites. > > That's when GoDaddy stepped in and closed us down. > > > > We tracked it back to bots hitting our wiki and trying to make > > anonymous edits. The bots would try to make edits, and that would > > spin-up that useless Wiki Editor from Wikimedia. The edit would > > eventually fail (during Save) because the bot was not authenticated. > > I seem to recall we were seeing between 3 and 7 edits per second from > > bots. > > > > The bots were also causing boatloads of OOM kills on our VM because > > the wiki editor was so heavy-weight. We had to constantly repair our > > SQL database because Linux was killing the MySQL instance. > > > > Eventually we had to move to Hostinger hosting. > > How did that solve the problem (I'm ignorant)? > > The thing is with these big or little but soon to big and overvalued on > the Dow Jones or whatever it is companies, you can't just call them on the > phone and ask them to be reasonable. I'm not even sure they control or > understand exactly what these robots are doing. I think they're already > out of control and on the loose, as it were.
GoDaddy's hosting plan provided a VM with 512MB RAM and no swap file. OOM crashes were pretty much guaranteed when software bloat met network bots. And GoDaddy was holding us responsible for [malicious?] internet traffic from other countries. At Hostinger we got a VM with more resources and a swap file for about the same price. And we got network protections from bots at no charge. Jeff
