| Did you know that over 40% of the traffic to your site are…bots?
You read that right!
Let’s look at an example. 

This is a screenshot showing the incoming traffic of a site. One might easily assume it got 3000+ visitors on 7th August.

But this is highly inaccurate!

After analysing the traffic, we found that automated bots were sending unnecessary requests to the site.

But wait, why are bots attacking sites? And how can they affect your site? 

To get clarity on this, you need to first understand that there 2 types of bots:

1. Good bots:
   These bots do not have malicious intent towards your site rather, they help! For example, Google’s bots scrape your site to allot SEO ranking. As SEO is an important factor for the success of an online business, this will help you rank better leading to more traffic and sales.
2. Bad bots:
   Unfortunately, it’s very easy to employ bad bots that can cause serious harm to your site. They send spam comments, overload your servers with thousands of requests and try to break into your site by admin credentials. Without a good security strategy in place, your site can easily get hacked or crashed. And you’d pay a huge amount in hosting fees!

Why are bots attacking you? 

Now this may be hard to believe but most of these attacks are completely…random. 

What we mean by that is, most hackers aren’t targeting your site in particular. They hack hundreds of sites and yours happened to be one of them.

There are 3 main motives why they’re attacking your site:

• They want to overload your server and make it crash  
  
• They want to steal your information 
  
• They want to redirect your site to other unsolicited sites which might be selling drugs or inducing viruses
  
• They want to learn how to hack better
  

How Do Bots Affects Your Site?

• They slow down your website:
  Bots send multiple requests over a short period of time. This overloads your server and can reduce your site loading time by on average of 30%!
  
  
• They increase the risk of being hacked:
  Hackers can program bots to inject malware into your database or to try to guess your login credentials using algorithms and combinations.
  
  
• SEO Bots send unnecessary requests:
  SEO tools like Ahrefs or SEMRush send requests to your site that add extra load. They also scrape data about your site and sell it to your competitors!
  
  
• They increase hosting costs:
  Hosting Providers usually charge you on the basis of traffic requests to your site. These unnecessary requests from bots inflate the price for you to bear! 

Most attacks tend to be sudden and fast – easily thousands of requests sent per second! In most cases, your host server would be unprepared for the sudden load and would crash.

We’ve clearly seen a growing need for sites to be protected from bad bots. And that’s where our Bot Protection feature in partnership with Cloudways comes in.

Our New Bot Protection Feature For Cloudways 

Cloudways and us go WAY back. Our team at BlogVault (our sister backup plugin) built the Cloudways migration plugin 4 years ago and have been good friends since!

So when the time came to enhance the Cloudways Firewall Protection, it was only natural that we partnered up.
The New Bot Protection feature: 

• Identifies And Anticipates Traffic Surges Even Before They Happen
• Blocks Malicious Traffic From Bots Which Are Harmful For Your Site 
• Protects Your Website From DDoS And Brute Force Attacks 
• Reduces Server Usage By 50% 
• Collates A Thorough Traffic Report

This is an absolute leap forward in terms of firewall protection.

Don’t believe us? Check this out →

Below you can see how the CPU usage of a site hosted on Cloudways without Bot Protection is at 80%.

This is the CPU usage of the same site with Bot Protection enabled: 

The CPU usage has dropped to 24%!

Not just that, here’s a screenshot from the Cloudways dashboard that shows the bad bots that have been blocked. 

Doesn’t this sound like music to your ears?

MalCare and Cloudways share a common belief:

| Your server resources are here to serve your customers, not some bad bots! | 

We spent months working on this feature and are happy to be revolutionising the industry standards of firewall protection.

You can read more about it on the Cloudways Blog here: Bot Protection Now Available on Cloudways For Enhanced Security at Zero Additional Cost

P.S: This feature is also going to be available to all MalCare Pro users soon! Stay updated on this by subscribing to our newsletter below. ????