[y2ksw]

Originally Posted by My Hattiesburg

I hope this is not getting off topic, but we don't have a host provider, we're attempting to manage the server ourselves at this point to save some money. Maybe once we get some ads going we can afford to go the managed route (which is actually what I'm working towards). But are you saying that a firewall would keep out the spambots and prevent an artificially high number of ad impressions?

Yes, sure. And it saves a lot of bandwidth and hacking attempts as well. If your site gets spammed heavily, it sooner or later gets hacked, too.

I use the Spamhaus DROP list to cut off the obvious and use fail2ban to fine-tune the firewall, besides of blacklisting all far too obvious login and register attempts by several scripts. Summing up, it means to cut off almost all unnecessary traffic and thus reducing also the hit count on ads.

Oh well ... and I use connection- and bandwidth-throttling for spiders, too.