Looks like we overlooked this little press release last year when Mecca Hosting announced Mecca Hosting Bounces Bad Bots from their servers.
Here's the good stuff:
Mecca Hosting, a leader in providing customized hosting solutions, has just released a new system to detect and block suspicious automated programs or "bots". Mecca Hosting's new system, by blocking these bad bots, helps protect customer's intellectual property, e-mail addresses, and prevents blog spamming and hacker attacks. This new system can detect good bots, like Search Engines and specialized tools, to allow them access to websites, while blocking the bad ones. This new technology will result in vastly increased website uptime and performance, due to the expected reduction in hack attempts; mainly because hackers use automated tools to find system vulnerabilities.Sounds good, but how good is it?
Just to see if it basically worked, I used a few tools to try to snag a page or two and got bitch slapped with 403 errors.
Not bad Mecca, not bad.
If we could just get all hosts to do this, and even dedicated server companies to offer this kind of technology, maybe the scrapers would already be out of business.
3 comments:
Sounds interesting. Have you tried out downloading stuff really fast with a regular user agent?
I tested a regular UA from my server and they slapped it. Considering most scraping comes from hosting farms it's fair to say they're on top of the biggest part of the problem.
I'll do a little more poking and prodding later when I have more time.
What type of "tools" did you use to do your testing?
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