Does Returning 403 status to spam bots increase Resource Usage?

easymmm

• October 25, 2023 23:59

My site is getting hit a lot by Spam bots like semrush/criteo/Sogou/etc. & they don't honor the deny setting in robots.txt Using .htaccess, I am denying them access, & returning a 403 status. It is rightly getting logged into the "Raw Access" logfiles as follows:

123.183.224.68 - - [25/Oct/2023:09:41:05 -0700] "GET /folder1/folder2/abc-webpage.html HTTP/1.1" 403 10125 "-" "Sogou web spider/4.0(+

Despite implementing all such blocks, my webhost keeps sending me mails saying "High Resource Usage" detected where most common error is "Entry Process (EP) Limit breached". My question: 1) Are such "403" responses also counted by cPanel as Entry Process? 2) What is the best way to prevent such spam attacks, without they contributing to "High Resource Usage" Thanks

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  cPRex Jurassic Moderator

  • October 26, 2023 19:09

  Hey there! cPanel itself doesn't count entry processes, as that is a feature of CloudLinux. More details on that can be found here:

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  easymmm

  • October 27, 2023 03:49

  Thanks @cPRex, Unfortunately, my host does not offer anything, except for sending the "High Resource Usage" warning emails, & the offers to move to a higher cost hosting plan :(( My observation - The incoming traffic is static over last several weeks. The Raw access log files are of similar size, Google Analytics visitor stats are steady, Google webmasters console reports are also similar. The only thing I keep seeing is these semrush/criteo/Sogou/etc hitting the site from multiple IP addresses. Each day, I add new entries to block the IP address using "deny from " in .htaccess, & it keeps logging 403 entries (plus the bots keep hitting from new IPs). Any possible solution to implement, please?

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  cPRex Jurassic Moderator

  • October 27, 2023 06:00

  Could you try blocking the bot in general with a robots.txt file, or is not that type of bot?

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  easymmm

  • October 27, 2023 06:38

  As I mentioned in my original message: " they don't honor the deny setting in robots.txt "

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  cPRex Jurassic Moderator

  • October 27, 2023 15:25

  Ah, reading is hard so I must have missed that! At that point, it's really on the host to offer you better firewall tools, or tools inside Apache, like mod-evasive, if there is repeated DoS-style activity on the system. There really isn't more you can do as just the cPanel user.

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