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Frequently Asked Questions

General and compatibility questions

I have an e-commerce website, but I am not sure if I need BotGuard's services. How can I check if I need BotGuard's protection? In recent years, bad bot traffic has grown so much that virtually any eCommerce website can benefit from using some kind of traffic management tool. You can easily perform a rapid scan of your website to check its current protection. This very simple scanner emulates access to your website with fake search engines, popular commercial bots, and browser emulators. This rapid test takes less than one minute and it will provide all the information that you need to make an informed choice about what BotGuard services can do for your online business.

What if you block some necessary bots by mistake? BotGuard have developed a special method to avoid false positives. BotGuard lets you start monitoring your automated traffic in no blocking mode. The website administrator is then advised by our AI Advisor to enable blocking rules one by one, based on your traffic. The BotGuard dashboard enables you maintain and fine tune custom blocking rules. If any identified threat requires your attention, you are notified by email.

Does BotGuard impact on search engines website indexing? No, search engines like Google, Bing, Yandex and others continue to access your website as usual.

Do you protect websites against DDoS attacks? No, BotGuard doesn't provide a service against Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. Typically, such an attack is targeted against the network infrastructure in an attempt to overload its resources. However, if protection against volumetric-DDoS attacks is provided, BotGuard is a great addition, since it can resist Denial-of-Service attacks at the application level (L7), blocking the bots' access to the web application.

I already use anti-DDoS protection. Do I still need your BotGuard's protection? Yes, this is our basic recommendation. It's important to note that BotGuard does not provide anti-DDoS protection. Rather, we integrate at the web server level to manage bot traffic (e.g. scrapers, content theft, competitive monitoring, hacker attacks). The most sensible approach is to combine the two forms of protection. For example, some of our partners combine Cloudflare for DDoS protection with our service for bot management, since our system is based on digital fingerprinting and can be fine-tuned to the needs of a particular website.

I use a Web Application Firewall (WAF) with custom rules. Can I still use BotGuard services for bot protection? Yes, you should combine your existing WAF with BotGuard's bot management service. You do not have to use our WAF at all. We already have a number of users who take this approach.

Do you provide web application vulnerabilities scanning? No, the BotGuard service analyzes your traffic, identifies the visitor, and helps your server correctly process the request in accordance with your own settings. We do not monitor your website security.

What about human visitor's privacy? Where do you store the traffic data? The short answer is we don't. We process the content of a website visitor's request, but we do not store this data. We process it dynamically and we do not use digital identifiers such as cookies or fingerprints that attribute requests to the unique user.

Do you have a demo? Yes, we have a demo website at demo.botguard.net, which is protected with the BotGuard Cloud Website Protection service. You are welcome to try emulating any bot or human traffic to our demo site and check whether the bots are blocked by BotGuard's service.

Which languages does the BotGuard dashboard provide? We currently provide an interface in English. The appropriate localized version is set up automatically according to the OS/browser language. We have a number of localized versions currently under development.

Do you use captcha? BotGuard does not use captcha by default. Normally, neither user action like captcha or additional input is required. However, you can configure the blocking policy so that captcha is used in doubtful cases. For most of your website users, nothing will change with their service.

Does using BotGuard increase website response time? Yes, the website response time can increase slightly due to the website visitor filtering. Fortunately, it's not more than a few milliseconds. BotGuard servers are located close by to ensure high speed and minimal network latency.

I can't login to my site control panel. I am blocked. BotGuard blocks access to the website admin pages for security reasons. You can create a special custom rule based on your IP address, or allow access to these pages from any address. To add a special custom rule, open the Rules Editor page and create a new rule based on your IP-address. Refer to Custom Rules for more information.

To allow access to everyone, create a rule (or a set of rules) allowing access to specific pages. For example, if the admin pages URL starts with http://example.com/admin/, then you can add a regex ^\/admin\/ to the rule to allow access to all of these pages.

Technical issues

I have a WordPress website on an Apache web server. Which integration method is recommended? We recommend integration at the web server level, as in this case the recognition quality is higher. In the event that this is not possible, you can integrate at the Content Management System (CMS) level with our WordPress plug-in.

Can I use API connectors to integrate with BotGuard? Yes, we provide an API for our partners to manage websites on their account. Typically we use this API in hosting panel integration modules. The documentation is available at SwaggerHub.

I have several websites in my account. Is it possible to see bot activity by website? Yes, you can easily use the filter located above the log grid to filter the results that you want to see.

I would like to be able to click on Blocked Bots to see more detail. You can do this by clicking on the link Add/Edit the rule.

Partner program

I would like to partner with BotGuard. Which locations are of interest to you? We engage in many partnerships all around the world. Please contact us directly to find out more.

I would like to partner with BotGuard. Do you provide any hosting panel modules like cPanel or DirectAdmin? Yes, we provide modules for DirectAdmin, WHM / cPanel, Plesk and ISPmanager. Please visit Hosting panels page for more information, or contact us directly if your panel is not listed here.

Is your client dashboard available white labeled? It is possible, but will be subject to special agreement. Please contact us directly to learn more.

How do I monitor the number of requests from my end-customers? You will always have access to the number of visitor requests directly on your dashboard. Please keep in mind that website statistics are updated after every one thousand requests. This is done to improve system performance, so if site traffic is low, this may take some time.