Question about Server Farms

[webnovice007]

question about these "server farms" I see many hacks originating from IPs assigned to OVH SAS all over europe; also datashack, wowrack, digitalocean, etc in the USA. are these server farms? it appears that they rent out by the month. am i correct?

[edited by: keyplyr at 7:43 pm (utc) on Sep 2, 2017]
[edit reason] cleaned up system chatter [/edit]

[keyplyr]

Hello webnovice007 and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

Server Farms is a broad category that includes Shared Hosting, Colocation, VPS, Dedicated Servers, Datacenters and Cloud. Basically these are companies that lease space on their servers to anyone who wants to rent it.

Some of these companies are pretty good about policing their customers, some are not or they just don't care. Also what seems like malicious behavior to us website owners, is just business as usually for many of these agents. They don't see their behaviour as anything wrong.

However, there is really no legit reason for other servers to be hitting our websites, so many of us block [webmasterworld.com] these server farm ranges, but there are a lot of them and this takes time and work.

There are of course some beneficial agents coming from many server farms ranges. These need to be allowed on a case by case basis via exceptions to the blocking rules.