This past April I found my Piwigo photo sites getting pounded by crawler bots. “Attacks” like these had happened in the past but apparently my newly expanded bandwidth (thanks to my Frontier fiber upgrade) allowed for a lot more in/out traffic to hit my server and it was slowing things down significantly with the increased the load. Looking at my server stats this apparently started in February but I hadn’t noticed until now.
I first tried a bot-blocking extension for Piwigo but it couldn’t keep up with the flood. I switched to Cloudflare as my domain registrar back in 2024 when Google sold its Domains business to Squarespace. Cloudflare offers a lot of other free services, some of which I took advantage of (like e-mail routing), but it had always been on my list to investigate the other stuff. Apparently now was the time to switch over to Proxied DNS.