Not the Traffic We Wanted
Earlier today the site became relatively slow. It took several seconds to open a page. There was a reason for that. Hundreds of thousands of pages were requested each hour, totalling about a million junk requests before we blocked the offending addresses.
This morning we wrote that "in this site we've seen a significant growth in traffic - to the point where this week the new site serves about 600,000 requests per day."
Millions of requests per day would be nice, but not if they're annoying bots that ruin the experience (speed) for real visitors, i.e. people.
The Web is becoming such a sordid mess - a vortex full of malicious bots. Moving everything to static helps, but it is no panacea. It's just a matter of magnitude; every site has its capacity limits.
Some months ago we had our first DDOS attack since going static. We don't miss that day. █