Dev.to
7/14/2026
How I cut my site's hosting bill from $82/week by fixing cache, bots, and self-DDoS
Original: I went from couch to coder and realized how much I didn't know
Short summary
A beginner coder built a movie-discovery site with AI assistants and faced an $82/week hosting bill. Investigation revealed four culprits: ISR cache writes billed in 8KB chunks inflated by crawler URL variants, cached poster fetches stored full JPEGs, the site DDoSing its own API, and legacy bot traffic to dead blog pages. Fixes included URL canonicalization, blocking scrapers by TLS fingerprint, and serving HTTP 410 for non-existent pages—cutting costs back to hobby levels.
- •ISR writes billed in 8KB chunks turned 70GB of cache into 8.69M billed writes
- •Site was DDoSing itself: homepage called its own API 58K times/day
- •Block scrapers by TLS fingerprint (JA4) and serve HTTP 410 for dead URLs
Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.
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