Why the visits from China

Avatar
  • Answered
One of the reasons I switched hosts was because my previous host logs reported an inordinate amount of traffic from China. It was awful, tens of thousands of visits daily from China on a site that has no Chinese, no value to the Asian market. I had a number of other issues with that provider around security and support. I am sure that the traffic from China was not legitimate, let alone the bandwidth being used was wasted.

I just looked at the log reports for my current site and I see about 90% from the U.S. and about 9% from China and a trickle from Russia, etc; this is the first time I even checked logs so I have nothing else to compare to. Is this happening again? Should I be concerned? I can allow that a certain amount of traffic will come from all over due to the nature of the internet and a bunch of reasons we don't have to discuss here. What is normal? Is this residual from the previous provider?
Avatar
Scott
Hello, Thank you for your question on website visits from other countries. While it is perfectly normal to get traffic from all over the world, a specific percentage cannot be identified as 'normal.' Certainly if you start getting a large surge from China, Russia, or other countries known for spam, malware, hacking, etc, you could say it was out of normal scope. If you were on host X and have transferred to host Y, but use the same domain name, your traffic would likely look the same. If a bot uses your domain name to access the site, it makes no difference what server it is located on as the DNS settings will route it to there it currently resides. While you cannot control who attempts to access the site, you can control who you allow to access it. You can control this via the htaccess file and block specific IP addresses, ranges, or entire countries altogether. This will vary from site to site as what one site wants as visitors, another does not. Kindest Regards, Scott M