Site slowed to a crawl, bot attack?

[lebowski99]

My site has been extremely sluggish in the past few days and the natives are getting restless. I use hostgator for my web hosting service. After checking several things, they sent me this response (I have subbed "XXXXXX" for my forum name):

Hello,

I have reviewed this support ticket. After reviewing this issue I believe the issue is that your VB forum is being attacked, in particular file

/home/XXXXXX/public_html/register.php

The server's ModSecurity rules are blocking the attack however since so many hit are being made to [ http://XXXXXX.com/register.php ] your HostGator is hitting the memory limit and max connections per HostGator's TOS:

+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=
[msg "Blacklisted IP Address for POST data StopForumSpam List"] [hostname "www.XXXXXX.com"] [uri "/register.php"] [unique_id "TzwgKK54CyIAAAjOYIgAAADk"]
+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=

I highly suggest setting up some type of spam protection system on your VB forums so that web bots are not attempting to registrar accounts. I believe this will significantly reduce the number of ModSecurity rules and memory limits on your account and in return make your VB to loading a run properly.

I am a little skeptical, but I suppose he could be right. In either case, I am at a complete loss as to how I should proceed to solve the problem.

Any suggestions?