I've had a sudden spike in bandwidth on my #Netlify account (that powers Cybercultural.com), and it's not correlated with an increase in traffic.
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Richard MacManusreplied to Szymon Nowicki last edited by
@hey @sarajw @bobmonsour @simoncox @phil @mcg @mjgardner I have an update for everyone following this thread: Netlify did respond overnight my time, and firstly they said they will refund the $55 charge (yay!). Also they said it *was* a single user agent that was responsible for the bandwidth spike. I've attached the UA screenshot they sent: Mozilla/5.0, which is a UA stripped of OS data. I've done a quick google and apparently this is probably a bot of some kind. Will dig more shortly.
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Richard MacManusreplied to Richard MacManus last edited by
@hey @sarajw @bobmonsour @simoncox @phil @mcg @mjgardner This Reddit thread was helpful, tho inconclusive: https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/15tz2gn/mozilla50_user_agent_without_os_in_string/
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Szymon Nowickireplied to Richard MacManus last edited by
@ricmac @sarajw @bobmonsour @simoncox @phil @mcg @mjgardner i say it’s a systematic problem that Netlify doesn’t address properly. Bots and bad actors will periodically cause traffic spikes for many reasons. If they charge for traffic they should ensure it’s a valid one.
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Richard MacManusreplied to Szymon Nowicki last edited by
@hey @sarajw @bobmonsour @simoncox @phil @mcg @mjgardner Absolutely agree. Users should never be charged for traffic spikes caused by nefarious actors. You can make a case it’s fair if the traffic is genuine (eg from a Hacker News frontpage), although even that is dubious — I’d prefer the site goes offline if you don’t have enough bandwidth, as happened in days of ordinary web servers
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Simon Cox :SEO:replied to Richard MacManus last edited by
@ricmac @hey @sarajw @bobmonsour @phil @mcg
@mjgardnerI note you are not blocking AI crawlers with your robots txt - if you want to this might be useful:
https://github.com/ai-robots-txt/ai.robots.txt/blob/main/robots.txtWill not stop the content thieves though.
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Richard MacManusreplied to Simon Cox :SEO: last edited by
@simoncox @hey @sarajw @bobmonsour @phil @mcg @mjgardner Yes, up till now I had decided not to block AI bots, as I figured it may be useful from SEO perspective (ranking etc) to be in Google AI Overviews, Perplexity, etc. But I will review that position now.
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Bob Monsourreplied to Sara Joy :happy_pepper: last edited by
@sarajw Depending on the number of monthly form submissions you need, these guys give you up to 250 free and have honeypot and hCaptcha. They're on my list if/when I migrate from Netlify. https://web3forms.com/pricing
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Sara Joy :happy_pepper:replied to Bob Monsour last edited by
@bobmonsour ooh that's nice. Still only email though, doesn't store them in a way I can pull back up to display like Netlify does. I do have a thing on the back burner for that, though..
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Bob Monsourreplied to Sara Joy :happy_pepper: last edited by
@sarajw Makes sense.
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jeduardoreplied to Richard MacManus last edited by [email protected]
@ricmac operational question: if you're on the free plan and you never entered your CC into their system, are they going to actually charge you (e.g. by invoice) or just suspend your account? Asking out of curiosity as I'm not a Netlify user.
It's also been interesting following your billing saga so far, so please continue.
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@jeduardo Probably they would’ve suspended my account, but it’s moot now as I have moved to Cloudflare.