On a site I used to run, there was no content which needed protection. So, it was not much of a pain except that there would be a lot of bot- filled contact for

On a site I used to run, there was no content which needed protection. So, it was not much of a pain except that there would be a lot of bot- filled contact forms. Slowly the problem became severe enough that bandwidth fees started becoming an issue. Finally had to use cloudflare in the front to reduce bandwidth usage. It worked but the side-effect was that some valid users may now get blocked.