Summary bot traffic spiked from the typical 4 x traffic to 9 x traffic causing the website to use too many resources and making hosting.com suspend the site to protect the other website who share this VPS server!
Big thanks to hosting.com for resolving this quickly.
FYI At the same time Cloudflare and an unnamed hosting company was dealing with
Follow on from [Resolved] Is MantisBT and the wiki being inaccessible for everyone? - #30 by gramps-project
apparently now the website is behind cloudflare as mitigation. unfortunately, this breaks fetching the RSS feed(s), e.g. https://gramps-project.org/blog/feed/ , because that URL does not return a valid XML document, but a HTML page containing cloudflares’ javascript captcha.
@azrdev Exclusion added a few hours ago for https://gramps-project.org/blog/feed/ it should now work.
I hit my phone’s data limit and the throughput is throttled until next week.
The Cloudflare verification screen does not complete loading before the refresh timer expires and the page reloads.
Its “stuck here? Send feedback” linked page is ALSO on a cloudflare validation timer. So if you’re stuck on validation that uses impassable validation for the feedback form, how is that useful?
The refresh time is too short anyway. I notice it constantly reloading on an idle browser. That seems like it would cause excessive server load.
Well there’s the problem. I’m not there, you are 
What speed have you been throttled down to by your provider?
They don’t specify the throttling speed.
I suspect it is artificial anyway. The connection still identifies as 5g but the slowdown seems variable. For instance, the top-level Facebook pages seem to still serve up at normal speed (their graphics load fast) but the drill down on threads are painful. Other sites are slow across the board.
Apparently that’s not working [any more], curl https://gramps-project.org/blog/feed/ right now returns me a html page full of (cloudflare) javascript), and my feedreader complains about the feed for the whole last week
Works for me and I’ve not changed the Cloudflare exclusions!
Cloudflare does mention on one of the support pages that exclusions are dependent on traffic being experienced and also independently if they identify any IP addresses that seem like bot they will block them, so please send me privately your IP address and I’ll also exclude you as I’ve done this for @emyoulation and myself then removed the IP exclusion later and found it was enough for Cloudflare to see us as friendly!
Can you confirm that when you mention the issue with the blog feed via curl do you actually mean that the Headline News Gramplet addon is not working for you?
@azrdev Mentions:
You mention bot protection and are on the free plan; so could the issue be the following
Thanks I believe you are right; I’ve turned off “Bot fight mode” @azrdev can you please test.
seems fixed now , though I’m unsure about the timeline:
my feedreader (rss2email) reports only failures until yesterday, this is the last one:
2025-07-19 23:23:07,738 [ERROR] HTTP status 403 fetching feed Gramps (https://gramps-project.org/blog/feed/
but currently curl works, so probably it’s fine now.
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