Temporarily shutting down my website

I just killed nginx on my VPS. The amount of traffic to my personal website right now is almost all bots. 95% or more of it is automated in some way, but I'd say more than 60% of it is coming from someone trying to take over non-existant Wordpress and WebDAV setups (I don't use either), or "security scanners" from legit companies that constantly ping my static site like it's going explode any second.

It's tiring, and I'm starting to doubt whether it's even worth keeping up anymore. The sad part is that the AI bots are more respectful than the security bots, with the latter pushing hundreds or thousands of requests in a matter of seconds, mostly for things that'll return a 404, or absolutely nothing because I set my server not to respond to those requests.

The problem really isn't that my site gets scraped. I just add the bots to a list to get nothing back, and that's fine. However, they can clog things up for actual people trying to get to my site. So instead of being able to get traffic from people who actually matter, the bots just basically DDoS everything whenever they can.

Sadly, escaping to gopherspace isn't really as much of an option as one might hope, as I've seen some of the same IP addresses in my gopher logs as show up for AI bots. There are also HTTP proxies for gopherspace, and nothing stopping them from tying into open-source gopher/gemini clients to scrape as well. I wouldn't worry about it so much if it wasn't potentially able to cost me a lot of money should something spiral out of control because of them.

For now, I'll just wait and watch. See if I can figure out a few things. Maybe even switch to Apache for finer control over some things.