How to Detect and Block Bot Traffic on Your Self-Hosted Website [2026]

It&rsquo;s Saturday morning. You open your analytics dashboard to see how your self-hosted blog did this week — and there it is: 4,000 &ldquo;visitors&rdquo; over the weekend, each one landing on a single page and leaving instantly. You know you didn&rsquo;t have 4,000 readers. You had maybe forty, and the other 3,960 were machines. You are not alone. A post that made the front page of Hacker News…