My team runs a quite popular website, #1 or #2 in the market depending on the region. Several million visits per day.
Around June/July we got a 10x boost out of nowhere, and it started affecting performance for users, increased hosting costs, and random bursts would bring the website down.
We spent some time trying out solutions, from Cloudflare and Anubis to AWS, but it ended up affecting real users, and we got complaints on Reddit from day one, pretty much. At the same time, it got a bit expensive having a WAF.
In the end the only solution that worked was blocking every single Chinese IP.
Traffic instantly got down to 10x less, same as it was before. Same conversion percentage as before.
Around June/July we got a 10x boost out of nowhere, and it started affecting performance for users, increased hosting costs, and random bursts would bring the website down.
We spent some time trying out solutions, from Cloudflare and Anubis to AWS, but it ended up affecting real users, and we got complaints on Reddit from day one, pretty much. At the same time, it got a bit expensive having a WAF.
In the end the only solution that worked was blocking every single Chinese IP.
Traffic instantly got down to 10x less, same as it was before. Same conversion percentage as before.