Help! Too Many Blog Visitors from China and Russia

15 replies
I have this one video blog that is eating up all my bandwidth because over 90% of the traffic is junk traffic from Russia and China.

I tried a free WP plugin called WP-Ban and one that purports to block by country (IQ Block Country) and they did not solve the problem.

It is so bad that I gave up increasing the bandwidth so now my site is suspended until I choose to increase bandwidth again.

Any ideas as to how to solve this problem.

I have another video blog with the same theme and no problems at all.

The site is about things to do in Toronto Canada.
#block country #block ip address #blog #china #russia #visitors
  • Profile picture of the author irawr
    Banned
    I would do this with a .htaccess file or host the video files on AWS.

    Try this:
    Block Visitors by Country | IP2Location.com

    it's free to ban one country, so figure out which one hogs the most bandwidth and have it make you a file. It goes in the same folder as the media.

    I'm sure there's also a way to implement the maxmind geo ip database and mod_rewrite, so your server would just query the DB and redirect them to either the media or to an empty video file.

    So the you would mod_rewrite
    Code:
    http://www.yourserver.com/media/media.file
    to
    Code:
    http://www.yourserver.com/media/media.php?media.file
    and the php script queries the DB
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    • Profile picture of the author cmcguinness
      Originally Posted by irawr View Post

      I would do this with a .htaccess file or host the video files on AWS.

      Try this:
      Block Visitors by Country | IP2Location.com

      it's free to ban one country, so figure out which one hogs the most bandwidth and have it make you a file. It goes in the same folder as the media.
      Great source. You can, for free, sequentially generate deny lists for multiple countries and merge them by hand, too. So you can deny multiple countries...
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  • Profile picture of the author trip3980
    Originally Posted by TrafficFlow View Post

    I have this one video blog that is eating up all my bandwidth because over 90% of the traffic is junk traffic from Russia and China.

    I tried a free WP plugin called WP-Ban and one that purports to block by country (IQ Block Country) and they did not solve the problem.

    It is so bad that I gave up increasing the bandwidth so now my site is suspended until I choose to increase bandwidth again.

    Any ideas as to how to solve this problem.

    I have another video blog with the same theme and no problems at all.

    The site is about things to do in Toronto Canada.
    I'm confused why are you not using youtube or vimeo? And if you are getting a lot of traffic from china and Russia why are you not tapping in to that market instead of blocking it?

    PS china has a firewall so if people want to access the internet their they often use socks or vpns. something to think about.
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    • Profile picture of the author irawr
      Banned
      Originally Posted by trip3980 View Post

      I'm confused why are you not using youtube or vimeo? And if you are getting a lot of traffic from china and Russia why are you not tapping in to that market instead of blocking it?

      PS china has a firewall so if people want to access the internet their they often use socks or vpns. something to think about.
      I'm assuming he's podcasting, if that's what you're doing the absolute easiest solution (and likely the best, maybe not the cheapest) is just to host the files on AWS (amazon web services.)
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      • Profile picture of the author trip3980
        Originally Posted by irawr View Post

        I'm assuming he's podcasting, if that's what you're doing the absolute easiest solution (and likely the best, maybe not the cheapest) is just to host the files on AWS (amazon web services.)

        makes more sense. like a small charge or something. I know their is a site called patreon. not as effective but it can work to the users advantage.
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    • Profile picture of the author TrafficFlow
      Originally Posted by trip3980 View Post

      I'm confused why are you not using youtube or vimeo? And if you are getting a lot of traffic from china and Russia why are you not tapping in to that market instead of blocking it?

      PS china has a firewall so if people want to access the internet their they often use socks or vpns. something to think about.
      The video site is just youtube videos and the youtube videos are hosted on youtube not downloaded to my site.

      I am not marketing to China or Russia as I suspect alot of the traffic could be people trying to hack into my site or to leave spam comments on the site.
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      • Profile picture of the author trip3980
        Originally Posted by TrafficFlow View Post

        The video site is just youtube videos and the youtube videos are hosted on youtube not downloaded to my site.

        I am not marketing to China or Russia as I suspect alot of the traffic could be people trying to hack into my site or to leave spam comments on the site.

        Could you post your site so I can see it. Maybe I can better understand after I see it.
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        • Profile picture of the author TrafficFlow
          Originally Posted by trip3980 View Post

          Could you post your site so I can see it. Maybe I can better understand after I see it.

          Site is thingstodointoronto dot org.

          Perhaps because it was not up for a week, traffic dropped (and use of bandwidth) it is now showing up and working.
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      • Profile picture of the author irawr
        Banned
        Originally Posted by TrafficFlow View Post

        The video site is just youtube videos and the youtube videos are hosted on youtube not downloaded to my site.

        I am not marketing to China or Russia as I suspect alot of the traffic could be people trying to hack into my site or to leave spam comments on the site.
        Wait... What? I'm super confused here. They ate up all the bandwidth doing what exactly? I'm trying to figure this out. How much bandwidth are we talking about here? I highly doubt comment spam bots ate up terabytes... If somebody is trying to bruteforce cpanel or something using tons of IPs then okay maybe but ... Were talking about a MEGATRON amount of IPs. If that's what is going on then your ISP should be helping you out here, not taking the site down. I'm seeing CLOUDFLARE.COM, so are you sure your site wasn't under attack ??? Like ... A really massive attack?

        Ok so there's 10 sites hosted from that IP, are those all yours? This all kind of doesn't make sense, there's a log somewhere of whats going on.

        Edit: From Cloudflare's site: "We never charge for bandwidth CloudFlare will never bill you for bandwidth usage. We believe if your site suddenly gets popular or suffers an attack, you shouldn't have to dread your bandwidth bill."

        What host are you on? This can't be website traffic ...
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      • Profile picture of the author ejullya
        TrafficFlow, if you think it is a lot of hacking, have you tried WordFence (you'll find it in the "add new plugins")? It is a free security program and it is awesome. In the Options, you can set it up such that you will block the attacker for hours. I used to have similar problem from the countries you mentioned plus other and it is significantly (majorly) reduced since I implemented WordFence on. Try it, if you have not yet! Good luck!
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  • Profile picture of the author writeaway
    I would use an IP sorter that changes your ads depending on where the visitors are coming from.

    Ask around for sponsors that convert Russian and Chinese traffic well and try those.
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  • Profile picture of the author onegoodman
    I would suggest before you block the traffic source, it might be a legitimate source of traffic, have you verified that your website is not ranked on some keyword on their search engine ?
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  • Profile picture of the author Brent Stangel
    I would suggest before you block the traffic source, it might be a legitimate source of traffic, have you verified that your website is not ranked on some keyword on their search engine ?
    It's still useless traffic.

    What do Russians and Chinese really want to know about things to do in Toronto?

    Put your content behind a Captcha. That way at least only humans can eat up your BW.
    Signature
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  • Profile picture of the author anaybose
    Are you sure, they aren't bot traffic? If it's a bandwidth problem, you can host your media files in some storage, such as AWS. If they are real visitors, then you can offer them some products instead of blocking them altogether. I have seen media sites eating too much bandwidth due to faulty settings.
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