Moved, I did, from Site5, to A2. The last 21 hrs was a wet and wild ride all without the protection of my trusty .htaccess file, the one with my Ip ban list. Within that time, 21 hrs, I received a total of 33 spam comments. Usually I receive only one or two. It is clear that without protection I would be inundated by comment spam.
Of course these IPs are only the ones that comment spammed me. There are many more that use their bots to do content scraping, trying to break into my site, trick my host provider, etc. There are too many to list.
Get, I do, a lot of referrer spam on my site. I’m pretty sure that every site gets referrer spam, they are ubiquitous. Usually I have already banned them and they are usually from Russia, such as xrus, dealing with lovely, nubile, young Russian women. These I treat like background noise: I glance at the error 403 and move on. Then occasionally, about once a month, I get a bona fide referrer spam marketing campaign, where someone really wants to make a negative impression on both my Google Analytics and myself. I then find and ban them.
