In reply to alex.

Mark, I have plenty beefy servers at work. But with a good connection and the spammers having a good connection, they can make literally thousands of connection requests a second. There is a point where Apache, even well configured, will fall behind that level of connection. Do the math, even at 1000 connection a minute, that is 60,000 an hour or 1.5 million a day run rate.

I don't say that they are trying to DDoS, I am saying that is the effect.

Good servers don't cost $10.