Meanwhile the maintainer of Bear Blog - very nearly the poster child for small blogs with 100 visitors per month - recently put up a post talking about how much extra infrastructure it takes to keep the service online in the face of the massive uptick in AI scraper bot traffic we've had over the past few years.

I haven't tried managing my own site in ages, but I get the impression that the modern Internet is pretty much just one big constant DDoS attack, punctuated by the occasional uptick in load when someone decides to do it on purpose instead of out of garden variety apathetic psychopathy.

My small personal blog with tens of readers a month gets thousands of hits a day from bots. The ROI there must be worthwhile for those bots but not for me to self-host

Always has been... https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/netslum/ [2004]

But, yeah, it's gotten way worse to the point where you can't even run legitimate services because sometimes you will be blocked just for not being a known entity. e.g. try running your own email server and sending mail to any major email provider.