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Not all website traffic is equal. Real visitors browse your pages and buy your products, while abusive bots can quietly use up your CPU resources and slow things down for everyone else.

To address this issue, we created WebGuard - a new tool in your hosting Control Panel that helps you protect your website from abusive bots. It shows you which traffic is using the most PHP CPU resources and lets you challenge suspicious traffic with a CAPTCHA. This reduces CPU usage from bot traffic and keeps your website fast for real visitors.

WebGuard is included for free with all hosting plans. You can find it in the hosting Control Panel > WebGuard.

What You Can See and Do

The Statistics tab is your starting point in WebGuard. It gives you an overview of what traffic sources are using your website's resources:

• User agent: the name a browser or bot uses to identify itself.
• Country: where the requests come from.
• Network (ASN): the organization that owns the IP addresses, identified by its Autonomous System Number.
• PHP script: the script on your website and the CPU usage it generates.

WebGuard shows hits, traffic volume, and PHP CPU usage, ranked by PHP CPU usage so the heaviest sources appear first. You can also view combinations, such as a specific user agent coming from a specific network.

Once you spot a source responsible for significant CPU usage, you can act on it right away. For example, you might find that a single user agent is responsible for most of your CPU usage. You can then create a CAPTCHA challenge rule for it with just a few clicks. The rule applies only to traffic that matches the specific user agent, so all other visitors are unaffected. If a real visitor does match, they can still get through by solving the CAPTCHA, while automated traffic usually can't. This helps prevent abusive bots from consuming a large portion of your resources and affecting your website's availability for legitimate visitors.

The other tabs in WebGuard let you dig deeper into individual requests in Explorer, review your challenge and whitelist rules, and browse the directory of known bots.

You Stay in Control

WebGuard doesn't challenge anything automatically. It gives you the data and the tools, and you decide which traffic sources to challenge.

To make sure legitimate traffic keeps flowing, search engine crawlers and webhooks are whitelisted by default. You can review or remove these rules at any time, and you can whitelist other traffic you trust.

Getting Started

1. Log in to your hosting Control Panel and open WebGuard.
2. Check which traffic sources use up the most CPU.
3. If you find a suspicious traffic source, add a CAPTCHA challenge rule for it.

Please check our article WebGuard - Traffic Analysis and Protection System for more information about WebGuard.