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While I was struggling with protecting my mom's site from the bot swarm I kept asking everyone who is still in the industry how small sites who don't have a kid with a computer science degree survive and the answer was pretty much "they don't" and that's so grim

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i know someone who ran their own server setup. they took it off the public-facing internet because the amount of bots it was getting even after Cloudflare protection was too much for a self-hosted server. and it wasn't even an indexed site.

I gave up, took the company website down. It gets almost no real traffic anymore and it's just a non-stop money sink to deal with the constant plug-in hijacks. The last one it replaced pages with advertisements for "weapons, ammunition and porn from China" that was what the TOS warning said.

Yeah, they had a really cagey hack that showed anyone coming from Google ads for meds but didn't show it if you went directly to the URL so of course I couldn't find it because I type the URL directly. 😑

Unless some regulation happens, I think you won't be able to really have a website anymore, and you'll have to pay Google to include your business info in their training models (or some variant of that). It's depressing as hell

I saw Spoonflower was getting hit pretty badly, too I'm wondering if AI companies will see this as a plus; less websites means they can consolidate users onto social media platforms

Spoonflower is being scraped so often and by so many AI bots that it's surpassed what their security will protect them against Does that mean they'll get a bill later or are the barn doors open?

Like there is no way this nonprofit could have paid for the number of hours I put into this just because I got stubborn and contrary! They are wrecking the most basic fundemental part of the internet I love: anyone can just make a little goofy website!

Hopefully they have a decent hosting provider that'll help them sort it. Otherwise, yes the answer is they just die :(

Yup. I help out a non-profit and it was going offline multiple times a day. Finally after much tinkering I've got it staying up, but to your point - I'm a senior software dev with a ton of devops experience giving my time away for free.

yeah, when I finally got in there and saw what was happening I was agog. they had bots trying to crawl 200 random iterations of an infinite number of URLs in their event calendar EVERY SECOND. the cpu load was at 115% and it kept crashing. every IP was unique. none identified as bots. CLUSTERFUCK!