Our servers have been running very close to capacity over the last couple of days and we believe the problem is that many sites on the server are being hit by rude robots.

Definition:

A robot is a computer program that crawls the internet gathering data.  In some cases these are helpful (i.e. Googlebot) and provide much needed indexing data to search engines or gather other useful statistical data.  However there are many out there that are just a problem.

Rude robots are robots that do not obey the robots.txt file's directives about which pages/directories it is allowed to crawl and which it is not.  In addition rude robots may open many more connections to a server than is normally considered "fair" causing a much greater load on the server.

Many rude robots also collect email addresses for spammers or other data to be used by such people.  Note: They can only collect addresses that are displayed on your store-front.  They cannot access your admin area or your customer details!

They are very difficult to stop.  Some will even pretend to be Googlebot or some other legitimate browser.  The only way to detect and eleminate them is through painstaking analysis of the servers log files to find ways to identify each bot and block or allow them as needed.

We are working on a solution to allow us to easily identify and block troublesome robots but this will take time to gather the relevant data so as to avoid blocking good robots such as Google.

We will issue further updates as they are available.  For the time being please do not create tickets/chats etc. regarding slow admin/store pages as this will only slow down our development of a fix.

Many thanks

EasyWebstore Support Team