Big Weed told me to not ban Pinterest. While I am not a huge Pinterest fan, she is/was so I listen to her. The problem is that Pinterest is hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS), a cloud host provider infamous for hosting bad bots. Here are the IP ranges to ban AWS but keep Pinterest coming back.
# AWS 52.192.0.0 – 52.223.255.255 52.192.0.0/11
deny from 52.192.0.0/13 52.200.0.0/16 52.201.0.0/17 52.201.128.0/18 52.201.192.0/19 52.201.224.0/20 52.201.240.0/21
# Pinterest 52.201.248.0/24 52.201.249.0/24
deny from 52.201.250.0/23 52.201.252.0/22 52.202.0.0/15 52.204.0.0/14 52.208.0.0/12
My friend was surprised when I told him that I banned all IP ranges of Amazon Web Services (AWS) from my site. It is particularly ironic considering that we both had recently attended an AWS Cloud Computing IoT presentation, which was well done and interesting to both of us.
AWS accounts for a huge chunk of the world’s cloud computing platform, and my decision to ban all IP ranges did not come lightly. I just simply could not keep up with all the comment spammers and scrapers coming out of AWS. It seems like I am not alone. This has been by experience as well. There are others.