I’m okay with a few crawlers, but not what’s effectively a DDoS attack by AI companies who abuse my resources generating terabytes of traffic and crashing my server while costing me money. I use Anubis now, which sucks from an accessibility standpoint but I’m not dealing with their malicious traffic anymore.

Yes if it’s tunneled to your self-hosting setup. With CGNAT you have to use similar services if you want to self-host.

Oops, although terabyte is 1000 GB, 1024 GiB is tebibyte

I host my main server on my own hardware, and a VPN on Hetzner because my shitty ISP doesn’t let me port forward. For the past year, bots were hitting my Forgejo instance hard. I forgot to disable registration and they generated hundreds of accounts with hundreds of repos with sketchy links, generating terrabytes of traffic from my VPS, costing me money in traffic. I disabled registration and deleted the spam, and bots still kept hitting my server for several months, which would cause memory leaks over time and crash it and consume CPU, and still costed me money with terrabytes of traffic per month. A few weeks ago, I put Anubis on the VPS. Now, zero bots hit my Forgejo instance and I don’t pay for their traffic anymore. Problem solved.