I'm popular in Europe, there's no reason people from Singapore, Russia, Brazil and literally every other country in the world to all start visiting very old articles and permalinks for comments en masse.

Having honeypot links is the only thing that helps, but I'm running into massive IP tables, slowing things down.

This is not what I want to do with my time. I can't afford the expensive specialised tools. I'm just a solo entrepreneur on a shoestring budget. I just want to improve the website for my 3k real users and 10k real daily guests, not for bots.