My website is being hammered by scripts and bots setup to download our largest files and images for no reason. Im talking large amounts of data, rotating ips, clear intent to be deceptive. Most of the ips are based out of areas of the world known for pretty bad practices.
Even though we have been around for over a decade and are a fairly well known property this has only started in the last couple months.
My question is simple.
Do you think people/companies would target your website now to overload/tax the server as much as possible to reduce your servers response times?
This would then reduce your overall site load times and possibly hurt your rankings.
Im not talking about rogue scraper scripts out of russia or hack tools out of romania. Im talking about rotating user agents and ips slamming the biggest files on your server tens of thousands of time per hour. Not enough to take the site down but enough to degrade performance.
I have found concrete evidence of this in my logs lately. Anyone else?
