Relentless AI scrapers pushed DNA Lounge's web hosting bill from $800 to $3,500/month.
That is a $32,000/year cost shift caused entirely by companies training models on their content without permission. AI companies are externalizing their massive training costs onto independent web operators, effectively taxing the independent web to build their proprietary models. 📉
@Pikapods Those are the same #Clankers that performed a multi-month #DDoS attack on my site!
Same excuse of 'AI scraping', but they used so many IP addresses, that fail2ban couldn't catch up.
Even when I reluctantly deployed Anubis on it, Anubis was struggling to handle all those requests. Yes, it was that bad! It eventually stopped after that.
These #AI companies are cybercriminal enterprises. DDoS attacks were illegal last time I checked, and so was the hacking that they did to Huggingface.