I think I've finally gotten to the bottom of this issue. It appears it wasn't the Amazon bot causing problems but rather someone hammering a different site on this server with traffic from a webhost based in China. I've now banned all the IP addresses associated with that traffic, so hopefully we won't have any issues like this again.

Thank you Michael, again you have come to our rescue!

I think I've finally gotten the upper hand on the AmazonBot traffic that's been hammering the site again lately. I resorted to blocking anything that identifies as "AmazonBot" at the server level (when you browse the internet, your browser sends a string called a "User Agent" which identifies what you're using to access the site - browser, version and typically operating system). That results in AmazonBot getting a "403 Forbidden" message when trying to access the site instead of actually being able to see anything.

When I implemented this change earlier, the number of guests dropped from over 400 to under 60 within an hour and things have been faster now than they have been in days.

Hopefully this will be the end of it.

Bravo Michel for identifying and fixing that problem! You are a pro!
Thanks for looking after us and keeping the site safe.

               

Once again getting hit with bot traffic - this time from Chinese company AliBaba Cloud (a subsidiary of Chinese tech company AliBaba Group; the cloud division has offices in the US, Hong Kong, Singapore and the UK apparently). Working on getting rid of them as well.

GRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!!

Thank you for all your hard work in keeping this site safe.You are amazing at what you do

   Oldiesmann --- Is there a reason why they do this?

Information gathering spyware. While every system, browser, program, does this, some are more aggressive. And often have different reasons.

Amazon's bot gathers information for their Alexa service to help better answer users' questions and such. I'm not sure what AliBaba is doing with theirs but I'm sure it's similar - allow their AI service to provide information to customers of businesses who buy it.

Bot traffic seems to be slowing down. In addition, I've made a few other tweaks to the server configuration at the suggestion of the control panel software I'm using (software that allows me to easily manage server/site settings among other things), and that seems to have sped things up even more. I'll be keeping an eye on things over the few days though to ensure the tweaks don't break anything.

Thank you!!