csf firewall blocking bots

hello , i need advise and help here , i was checking csf firewall to stop server hack attempts, it worked well but issue is it seems blocking all bots, how i know ? with firewall on my who is online shows 120-140 guests, whereas without firewall figure is around 200, what should i do now :(

Software firewalls are rarely worth the hassle they provide. I would suggest disabling it and if you need a firewall, buy/lease a piece of hardware, or move datacenters. 99% of firewall issues can be stopped by the data center's main pipe firewall.

hard firewall are very costly, the main issue i use csf is because of extra features like port scanning alert,ssh login alert,memory usage alerts, suspicious process alert etc which cannot be achieved with hardware firewall :(

Originally Posted by bhanuprasad1981

hard firewall are very costly, the main issue i use csf is because of extra features like port scanning alert,ssh login alert,memory usage alerts, suspicious process alert etc which cannot be achieved with hardware firewall :(

I would never advise running a web server without a software firewall, even if you have a hardware firewall. CSF can work directly with software running on the server and can be triggered by a whole host of issues.

In regards to CSF blocking bots, i highly doubt it is blocking the traffic you are wanting. I would suggest picking up the IPs and heading over to dnsstuff.com and looking up who they belong to, I will bet all the ones being blocked are mainly china.

We have not had any issues with blocking google or bing.

I too use CSF and works quite well on my box.