AskJeeves == DDOS

In the past 2 hours or so, Ask has essentially launched a massive DDOS attack on my site. They managed to crash my server (twice) just by requesting so many pages. So, I just banned them - using robots.txt, but they can ignore that, so I added this to the top of my PHP pages:

if (preg_match('#Ask Jeeves\/Teoma#', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']))
{
     die('Ask Jeeves/Teoma is evil and tends to crash servers. So, it\'s blocked. Sorry, kind of. We\'re all for competing with Google, but it\'s not our fault the spider sucks.');
}

PHP:

I've heard similar reports, and people complaining that Ask ignores robots.txt, and people calling them but Ask doesn't care/won't do anything.... So yeah, I'm essentially boycotting Ask until they stop sucking. Anyone care to join me?

 

what does the code you provided do exactly?
how is it better than using robots.txt?

 

If the AskJeeves spider requests a page from my server, it shows that error message. Therefore no CPU time or database stress will be spent on it.

 

i like the idea.
how did you know how to code that?
did you research how to do it on the net?

 

I didn't research it, I wrote it. I do websites for clients and it's pretty standard PHP.... a regular expression pattern against the reported browser.

 

Hmm Teoma crawls my sites but i didn't had any trubles ....