Mitigating 99% Disk Exhaustion Caused by AI & SEO Scrapers
The Context (Business Challenge / Problem): A partner running a sports news portal contacted us with a critical issue: the editorial team was entirely unable to publish new articles. A quick infrastructure health check revealed a severe problem: the server’s disk space was at 99% utilization. Further investigation showed that legitimate readers were not the issue. The disk was being aggressively consumed by massive cache files generated by relentless requests from AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Applebot) and SEO scrapers (SemrushBot, AhrefsBot). This uncontrolled automated traffic was actively draining disk space, CPU, and RAM, effectively paralyzing the business’s publishing workflow. ...