I’m providing hosting for a few FOSS services, relatively small scale, for around 7 years now and always thought the same for most of that time. People were complaining about their servers being hit but my traffic was alright and the server seemed bulky enough to have a lot of buffer.

Then, like a month or two ago, the fire nation attacked the bots came crawling. I had sudden traffic spikes of up to 1000x, memory was hogged and the CPU could barely keep up. The worst was the git forge, public repos with bots just continuously hammering away at diffs between random commits, repeatedly building out history graphs for different branches and so on - all fairly intense operations.

After the server went to its knees multiple times over a couple days I had to block public access. Only with proof of work in front could I finally open it again without destroying service uptime. And even weeks later, they were still trying to get at different project diffs whose links they collected earlier, it was honestly crazy.