It had to happen, eventually. My AI crawler antagoniser, https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/ has been seeing sustained traffic of between 300 and 500 thousand hits per hour. I've not been particularly bothered by that, but a couple of days ago, my provider, @bitfolk, sent me a bandwidth warning: I'm on track to hit 2TBytes of outbound bandwidth this month and end up paying for the excess.

So I've added firewalling - if more than 5% of machines in a /23 network hit spigot within an hour, then the entire network gets a temporary block until it completely stops hitting my server. Hopefully that will cut things back enough to avoid charges.

The thing that amazes me is that the list has already accumulated nearly 10,000 entries. Put another way, I'm already blocking 0.12% of the whole IPV4 address space because it's being used for web crawling.

An infinite maze of twisty little pages

@pengfold
Just to be clear, this is interesting work, we are happy to comp you a bit more transfer allowance to take the pressure off so you don't have to rush to implement any changes. Send a support ticket to discuss if you want…

@bitfolk and this is why I really love Bitfolk!

Thanks for the offer. I'll monitor things over the next day or so and decide if I need to do more.