Why does my blank website have so much activity?

3

I've recently created a new domain and website for personal/hobby use. I've never had a publicly available website before.

I'm using Microsoft Azure as my hosting provider. The domain is a standard .com domain, e.g. example.com

Currently the website is blank. I haven't done anything with it. Regardless, when I look at the Azure tools, my page seems to have a lot of activity.

The website has been active for about one month. It has similar activity for the past few weeks.

Last 24Hr

Last 24 hours

Last 1Hr

Last hour

It looks like there is a pattern there. I'm currently getting over 1,000 requests per day.

What might explain this activity? How would I go about finding out?

Why would there be a massive spike between 11pm and 6am?

Rowan Freeman

Posted 2014-12-12T03:22:32.897

Reputation: 133

1Welcome to the Wild Wild Web. Raw logs will tell you alot, but there are lots of things that index and once you get on their list they just keep coming back. Good example: the google bot, bad example: the yandex bot. – Tyson – 2014-12-12T03:30:47.903

Also don't get excited thinking 1000 requests a day is high... learn to understand a page load could be 100 requests. – Tyson – 2014-12-12T03:33:02.453

see also: http://www.incapsula.com/blog/know-your-top-10-bots.html

– Tyson – 2014-12-12T03:34:44.827

Answers

1

What might explain this activity?

  • Indexing crawlers run by search engines
  • Zombie bots looking for victims to recruit / subvert / steal from.
  • Your new domain reuses a name someone previously used, that appears in links elsewhere.

How would I go about finding out?

  • Set a robots.txt to exclude all.
  • View (a sample of) HTTP logs (normal and especially error logs) for
    • client names that refer to search engines
    • suspicious request payloads
    • GET /pics/lolcat01289.gif
    • referrer URLs

Why would there be a massive spike between 11pm and 6am?

I don't know, but it may become clearer if you check the logs. Speculation: people turn on their infected PCs in the evening in their time zone? Your hosting provider checks it's clients services are working on some rota?

RedGrittyBrick

Posted 2014-12-12T03:22:32.897

Reputation: 70 632

Asked: 2014-12-12T03:22:32.897

Viewed: 97 times

Active: 2014-12-12T11:17:53.093