WordPress managed web hosting company Kinsta announced that it is changing how it bills its customers by not charging users for bandwidth related to unwanted bot and scraper traffic.
Daniel Pataki, CTO at Kinsta explained:
“In the past 12 months we’ve seen bot traffic rise due to the prevalence of both good and bad uses of AI. These bots can not be filtered as effectively, modifying our typical visits-to-bandwidth ratio. We’re working internally and with Cloudflare to improve bot filtering, but our top priority remains our customers’ success. Reducing bot-related costs as quickly as possible will have the greatest impact.”
Bot And Scraper Traffic Out Of Control
Anyone who’s watched their live traffic statistics can confirm that scraper and hacker bots make up a significant amount of traffic to a website, accounting for as much as half of the bandwidth costs for a website. I still remember the time I added a forum to a content site a few years ago and purposely left it without bot protection to see how long it would take to get spammed. I didn’t have to wait long; a spam bot registered itself and started posting spam within minutes.
Kinsta is providing bandwidth-based options that don’t charge for wasted bandwidth while also providing options such as caching and CDNs that help mitigate the impact of bad bot visits.
Kinsta’s announcement explains:
“Now with bandwidth-based options, Kinsta is giving customers more choice, transparency and control in how they pay for hosting: by visits or bandwidth. Customers are not locked into a single pricing model. This is consistent with Kinsta’s long-term approach of delivering quality and building trust. The new pricing option is setting the standard for hosting by giving customers the freedom to choose how they pay, in a way that reflects how the modern web actually works.”
The new feature is available to every visitor-based tier, enables the flexibility to switch between visits and bandwidth-based, and with improved usage notifications plus no charges for scrapers and bad bots the risk of unexpectedly running out of bandwidth is lower.
Read Kinsta’s announcement:
Kinsta Launches Bandwidth-Based Pricing to Give Website Owners and Developers More Hosting Control
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Paul shuang
