T he web is said to be about free access, and I certainly agree. When China's Great Firewall entered a more rigorous phase, and Google decided to leave China, some said that free access to information on the internet was a basic human right, I disagreed. Still, here in Toronto, Canada I do appreciate open internet access. There are limits, however, when certain people take advantage of your hospitality. People try to scrape your site to use for their purposes, they try to break in and use your site to launch their own malicious doings, they try to spam you so that your site's comments increase their link and trackback stats. There are all kinds of schemes that cost the site owner bandwidth, and eventually money. The site owner is forced to increase his level of service from his ISP (or get kicked off of his shared service), or move to another ISP. This is not a zero sum issue: The site owner loses financially. So what can a site owner do? There are a couple of things you can do, all with almost no expense other than your time and effort. You will need to be able to use some services from your ISP and edit some files on your account. You will also need to use Google search, which is pretty easy. The first couple of tools are available on your account from your ISP: AWStats and the IP Ban Manager . AWStats shows you accumulated statistics on