I couple of weeks ago I posted that I look after a not-for-profit 'hobbyist' educational website with very little/no regular income that is being hammered.
A lot of people on here mentioned the free Cloudflare level which I signed up for. This definitely helped controlling AI bots.
However this morning I got this message from the webhosts:
"Yesterday, your site was accessed from 486,109 different IP addresses; over the past week it's been nearly 2.5 million. Many of these are only used a handful of times then discarded."
Is there any way of managing this through Cloudflare?
UPDATED
Thanks for all the responses. They have given me a lot to look at. In terms of the page requests looking at the logs a lot of them appear to be long fabricated junk urls made up of parts of genuine urls. So:
Genuine url: root/a/b/c
Fabricated url: root/a/c/b/b/a/c/a/c/c