In this article I’m going to explain why stopping malicious user activity and hacks from running on your account, is important to keeping your account’s resource usage low.
What is a malicious user?
Your website is open to anyone on the Internet, with this availability to the world it also brings along with it certain risks, one of those being a user that just wants to be malicious and try to cause problems for others.
Typically when malicious activity is going on, it usually happens in bulk, and this can make the server have to work extra hard. Because of this it’s important to identify and stop so that the activities of a few malicious users don’t ruin the experience for all of your other users.
The most commons activities for a malicious user would be spamming or trying to hack into your website. You can read about stopping brute force and spam attacks or dealing with spam in your posts and comments for ways to help limit these types of malicious activity.
Hacked website
A hacked website can easily lead to a lot of extra resource usage on your account, as a hacked website will typically try to do multiple things for each page load on top of what your normal website already does. Hacking activity is usually automated as well, and this typically also leads to a higher amount of resource usage to handle the flood of requests.
If your website has already been hacked, then you might also like to learn about cleaning up a .htaccess hack or clean up a code injection attack which are common ways hackers will try to re-direct traffic from your site.
If you have a WordPress site you could also learn how to reinstall WordPress after a hack to make sure you’ve removed all traces of the break in. If you just have a lot of comment spam then you could read about WordPress comment spam clean up to help with that.
Blocking access to website
When your account has to deal with activity from malicious users it can cause resource usage problems, and in extreme cases even lead to an account suspension.
You can learn how to block unwanted users from your site using .htaccess to limit certain users from accessing your site at all. If you have one website that is causing problems you could also try to disable the problematic site for troubleshooting so it doesn’t cause problems for the rest of your websites while trying to track down the problem.
You should now have a better understanding oh what a malicious user is, and how the activity from a malicious user or hack could cause excessive resource usage on your account.
