alpha1beta

Amazing.
The U.S. should do the same. Hell, I’d go further, I’d ban it for everyone and make it prescription only for those who prove their addicted.

Two things to consider - check out Pressable or another dedicated WP Host. If you’re over the price for shared hosting, they’re competitive with Dedicated/VPS + addon backup solutions. They have a ton of caching built in, plus hourly backups. But it’s not for everyone.

One thing with the CDN considerations - where’s your audience? Local like in or around one city? Or local as in one country. The wider the reach, the more a CDN is beneficial. It doesn’t sound like it would help a lot. But it can also offload storage and the load of serving those requests.

To add what others said - Caching. You could do it on site and add Cloudflare on top of it. But you’ll probably want to add a few custom rules to cloudflare like Geo-restriction + no caching on /wp-admin/. Cloudflare also has anti-bot tech.

Beyond that, I’ve been waging a war on bots for a number of reasons. One of the easiest ways to block them is to block ASNs if you use Cloudflare. If AI or bot traffic is a problem, read on. If not, don’t worry about any of this.

If you want to block IP ranges yourself in Apache/nginx, your firewall, or your VPS provider’s firewall, start with looking up IPs in Amazon and Microsoft’s IPs (Like as listed here: https://ipinfo.io/AS16509) and start with the largest ranges.

With one line you can block 4.1M IPs from Amazon: 3.0.0.0/10 - start with these and go down to /16 and in a few hours you’ll kill access to tens of millions of bots.

You can also block by user agents.

I’m happy to share some Apache Rules/files if it would be helpful.

My theory on blocking is simple: I try to block as much as possible as far from the application layer at possible. It costs the most, in computational resources you pay for, to add a firewall inside of WordPress, like Wordfence. It also protects you the least. Blocking at Cloudflare and the VPS’s providers firewalls would be most efficient, followed by the firewall on the VPS, followed by an Apache/Nginx firewall, and then your application layer - WordPress. If you’re problems are mostly bot traffic, you want block as much bad traffic as possible without false positives.

Interesting piece but also misses one major point: Its always more expensive to create than maintain and vendor lock-in and high switching cost make it difficult to change and easy to pass along cost increases.

Basically, for AWS to double its income, it doesn’t need to double its customer base, it may need to raise fees a bit, bring on some new clients, but mostly let its customer base expand and use more resources including simple having more data - more rows in databases - and more backups. They don’t have to build anything new in AWS to do that, but when they do add new AWS products they’ll move some revenue around (think companies moving from EC2 to a dedicated managed database) and they’ll extract more revenue from the same customers. AI may accelerated this, but given its generally output, I think the whole push to use AI is just dog fooding trying to get fools to buy another product and locking themselves further into the ecosystem.

so let’s make a list of “people” she covers for:

• Pedophiles
• Terrorists
• Violent insurrectists
• Illegal gun owners

Am I missing anyone?