OVH hosting slowdown

Domains and Hosting
1

Hello,

Are any of you noticing slowdowns at OVH today?

Since this morning, my site hosted on a shared OVH Web hosting has been unusually slow at times. I also feel that the OVH Manager is slower than usual.

I haven't seen any specific incident reported on the OVH status page.

Are you seeing the same thing on your side today, or is everything working normally for you?

Thanks for your feedback :slightly_smiling_face:

2

Hello @AggieR

Personally, on my PERSO I had to transfer my scripts TWICE before the changes to them were taken into account.

3

Hello @AggieR

Feel free to create a support ticket, specifying:

  • Date and time of the last observed slowdown
  • The URL where you encounter the slowdown
  • If you encounter an error, a screenshot of it
  • Time taken for the page to load, even if it generates an error
  • The public IP address of the machine experiencing the slowdown
  • Whether this behavior also occurs from another network, e.g., 4G

This information allows us to check activity on your infrastructure at the time of the slowdowns.

Astérix

4

Looking a little further, I realized that I was being flooded with bots from abroad making a huge number of automated requests on products, categories, filters, etc.

But I especially identified a particularly aggressive bot coming from Latvia – IP 86.54.25.176. Since this morning it has been generating thousands of requests and scanning various PrestaShop modules, testing many URLs and files. Clearly looking for vulnerabilities.

So I set up a fairly radical GeoIP filter: I now block traffic from the entire world except Europe, the United States and Canada, with a few additional European countries blocked, including Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. Of course, I kept exceptions for search engines and major legitimate bots.

Since implementing the block, the site is noticeably more responsive and the Latvian bot that kept hammering the server is now receiving 403s :laughing:

I will continue monitoring, but given the amount of automated traffic I’m seeing, I think the bot phenomenon on web hosting really deserves close attention.

5

To block bots, you can also block the user‑agents used in the requests they make to your hosting with these lines in the .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.(meta-externalagent|Amazonbot). [NC]
RewriteRule .* - [F,L]

Here the meta‑externalagent and Amazonbot bots will encounter 403 errors if they make requests to a site using this block.

It’s much more drastic with GeoIP but also works :wink: in any case, good that the anomaly has been located and fixed :slight_smile:

Astérix

6

Thanks Asterix for the tip :+1:
Indeed, blocking by User-Agent is a very good idea and can perfectly complement filtering.

Unfortunately, in my case, a good portion of the problematic bots don’t identify themselves as such. Some simply use a classic browser User-Agent (Mozilla/5.0, Chrome, etc.).

So, if I only block known User-Agents, those masquerading as real browsers will continue to get through.

That’s why I went with GeoIP, which is certainly much more drastic :sweat_smile:, while keeping exceptions for the search engines and legitimate crawlers I need.

But I’ll keep your idea in mind: GeoIP + blocking of certain identified User-Agents can make a very good combination.