Long story short, my VPS, which I’m forwarding my servers through Tailscale to, got hammered by thousands of requests per minute from Anthropic’s Claude AI. All of which being from different AWS IPs.
The VPS has a 1TB monthly cap, but it’s still kinda shitty to have huge spikes like the 13GB in just a couple of minutes today.
How do you deal with something like this?
I’m only really running a caddy reverse proxy on the VPS which forwards my home server’s services through Tailscale. "
I’d really like to avoid solutions like Cloudflare, since they f over CGNAT users very frequently and all that. Don’t think a WAF would help with this at all(?), but rate limiting on the reverse proxy might work.
(VPS has fail2ban and I’m using /etc/hosts.deny for manual blocking. There’s a WIP website on my root domain with robots.txt that should be denying AWS bots as well…)
I’m still learning and would really appreciate any suggestions.
How would I go about doing that? This seems to be the challenging part. You don’t want false positives and you also want replayability.
If you’ve already noticed incoming traffic is weird, you try to look for what distinguishes the sources you don’t want. You write rules looking at the behaviors like user agent, order of requests, IP ranges, etc, and put it in your web server and tells it to check if the incoming request matches the rules as a session starts.
Unless you’re a high value target for them, they won’t put endless resources into making their systems mimic regular clients. They might keep changing IP ranges, but that usually happens ~weekly and you can just check the logs and ban new ranges within minutes. Changing client behavior to blend in is harder at scale - bots simply won’t look for the same things as humans in the same ways, they’re too consistent, even when they try to be random they’re too consistently random.
When enough rules match, you throw in either a redirect or an internal URL rewrite rule for that session to point them to something different.