Re: Running a Personal Website Is Not Fun Anymore

September 7, 2026 I just read Winnie Lim’s post, Running a Personal Website Is Not Fun Anymore. She writes about the constant barrage of bots, crawlers, and attacks that have made running her personal website a lot less fun. Her post prompted me to take a look at the firewall traffic for my own site. I’m hosted on Vercel and, to be honest, I’ve never paid much attention to the firewall. I just assumed Vercel was taking care of things in the background. Looking at the firewall logs, it appears they’re taking care of quite a bit. Looking at just the past 24 hours, Vercel denied nearly 1,000 requests and challenged another 680. At first I wasn’t sure what to make of those numbers. A lot of the traffic to my site is legitimate automated traffic from RSS readers like NetNewsWire, Feedbin, Feedly, FreshRSS, Reeder, and others. Then I filtered the firewall traffic to show only the requests Vercel had denied. Bots were trying to access .env files in just about every location imaginable. There…