>Not that kind of answer - this is bad manners or worse. The counter-question "Why do you ask that" isn't an honest or meaningful answer - it's indefensible def

>Not that kind of answer - this is bad manners or worse. The counter-question "Why do you ask that" isn't an honest or meaningful answer - it's indefensible defense of allowing meaningless traffic without any defenses. Nah. Based on years of experience, the typical person asking this question is asking because they're bothered by log entries. They're not asking it because the requests are actually being somehow disruptive. The correct answer is "don't stress out about normal background noise". >Maybe $100/mo isn't a trivial amount for a site that has no video, isn't dynamic, etc - your assumptions contradict themselves and reality. $100/mo is a trivial amount for anything that is visited hundred thousand times in a second. >It's absolutely clear that giving a free reign to bots will encourage more bots and more sinister behavior because the boundary between bot scraping and ddos is blurry, you're essentially arguing for allowing soft ddos which can be turned up at times just to make a site ineffective when it's needed. Not really. The bots have a strong incentive to not be disruptive. >Without any maybe, the prices of RAM, bandwidth and hosting are going up while usage limits are going down - inflation. There's no reason to sacrifice $100/mo to hostile bot daemons which are sure to ask for more and more in the future. Prices of bandwidth and hosting are not going up, usage limits are not going down. This is not a real thing that's happening. Servers (and bandwidth) are in fact cheaper than ever, except perhaps for the RAM.