Crazy amount of guests

[smallwheels]

I became curious and checked a couple of Sellers of Residential Proxies (the first hits on google) regarding where their own IP addresses belong to:

Name	No. of Proxies (claimed)	No. of customers (claimed)	website resolves to IP from	company location according to website	Domain registered in	domain created / updated
scrape.do	110 Mio	?	cloudflare	US (but probably Turkey)	? / redacted	2020 / 2024
bright-data.com	440 Mio+	20k+	cloudflare	Israel	godaddy / US privacy protection service	2015 / 2026
oxylabs.io	177 Mio+	15k+	cloudflare	LT	101domains / redacted	2015 / 2020
webshare.io	80 Mio+	60k+ paid / 120k active	cloudflare	US / California	namecheap / unknown privacy protectn service	2017 / 2025
proxy-seller.com	20 Mio+	?	cloudflare	Cyprus	namecheap / Cyprus	2015 / 2025
evomi.com	30 Mio+	?	Framer B.V. / AS16509 (Amazon.com, Inc.)	CH	tucows / privacy protection service	2014 / 2026
iproyal.com	32 Mio+	?	cloudflare	UAE	namers / SE privacy protection service	2018 / -
dataimpulse.com	90 Mio+	?	cloudflare	US / Florida	godaddy /US privacy protection service	2008 / 2025
proxyrack.com	12 Mio+	?	AS16509 (Amazon.com, Inc.)	Fake Office in Hongkong	namecheap / IS privacy protectn service	2012 / 2024

All of these services claim to only have ethically sourced proxies. The majority hides behind Cloudflare and two are on Amazon. Which means: Cloudflare actively supports or at least tolerates scraping companies as their customers. This should in my eyes be a bit of a warning sign.

 

[lazy llama]

Cloudflare is used by 24 million+ websites.
The vast majority of those are on the free plan so Cloudflare are unlikely to have vetted or even be aware of the businesses behind them.

People running res.proxy businesses are probably more in need of protection from DDoS by competitors (and more aware of what Cloudflare offer) than most businesses, so it’s not really surprising that they’re using them.

Should Cloudflare ban them? Possibly, if they know about them, but there’s that saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies even closer.

 

[smallwheels]

People running res.proxy businesses are probably more in need of protection from DDoS by competitors (and more aware of what Cloudflare offer) than most businesses, so it’s not really surprising that they’re using them.

Should Cloudflare ban them? Possibly, if they know about them, but there’s that saying about keeping your friends close and your enemies even closer.

Those companies do use Cloudflare not only to protect their websites from DDoS but probably also to hide, so it will be close to impossible for anyone to file complaints with the real hosting company or to find out about the people running these services. That's what many shady businesses to and it costs nothing and is quick and easy. Cloudflare could do something against it but they obviously don't care, for whatever reason. The hiding and protection that Cloudflare offers to those service providers clearly is part of the problem.

 

[DarkGizmo]

These AI crawlers/bots absolutely destroy my resources. I'm having to look to upgrade my hosting or possibly move to another host that offers more resources as it's becoming nearly impossible to run my site without having thousands of gusts/bots online at any given time. On the stat sheet it looks great, but when they're whacking your CPU usage & memory usage to 100% more often than not, it's a huge issue.

 

[ES Dev Team]

Somehow we're doing great with fail2ban + ASN blocks, guests around 3000 average and no big spikes.
Don't know how long the peace will last. But things have been quiet for 1-2 months here!

 

[DarkGizmo]

Somehow we're doing great with fail2ban + ASN blocks, guests around 3000 average and no big spikes.
Don't know how long the peace will last. But things have been quiet for 1-2 months here!

fail2ban? also how do asn blocks work? is that within cloudflare?

 

[smallwheels]

fail2ban? also how do asn blocks work? is that within cloudflare?

Read the thread that you are posting to. It has all been discussed in depth in here - that is the reason for and the purpose of this thread, so make use of it instead forcing everyone else to start from the very beginning again what has already been discussed over the last 16 pages.