A surprising 51 percent of traffic to an average Web site -- one
with 50,000 to 100,000 monthly visitors -- is potentially bot
generated, according to new research from Web security and
performance company Incapsula. On top of that, 31 percent of
overall traffic to these such sites is malicious. The news is
worse for very small sites -- or those with fewer than 2,500
monthly visitors. Incapsula examined more than a thousand small
sites and found that 83 percent of each site's traffic comes
from non-human (bad bots and good bots) with bad bots accounting
for 49 percent of traffic. So what is the overhead represented
by this automated bot traffic? Malicious bots will try to steal
data, of course. But that's only some of the harm they pose to
your Web site. Hosting providers are realizing that there is
increased capacity overhead for each site deployed on any server
because bots waste capacity, bandwidth, and power. Most this
automated traffic is fixed, completely unrelated to the Web
site's genuine human traffi