Hi everyone.

I run this forum:

https://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl

Starting a few days ago, it has been struggling to handle the bot load. The YaBB software is was saying 2500 "visitors" (I have the time period set to 15 minutes). This how now increased to nearly 4000. Rebooting worked briefly to bring the speed back up to normal, but I think the bots figured out that trick and are now back in higher numbers. That tricks does not work any more. The forum has 3,700 users, 117,000 topics and 3,400,000 posts.

I am on a namecheap VPS Quasar hosting plan with 6GB of RAM. Would a "better quality" host deal with this better? I have been with them for nearly two years without issue, so I suspect this is a new advance in bot maliciousness, not a host issue.

Namecheap contacted me and gave me some suggestions for robots.txt, but that made no difference. They made two other suggestions. One is that Perl is outdated and does not handle high traffic well because it "spawns a new perl interpretter for nearly every request." Does not mean that I would get around the problem by migrating to one of the php forums?

They also suggested cloudflare. How painful is that to set up, and will the free version or the $20/month version solve my problems? I don't think I could afford the next one up.