Shawn Hogan, DigitalPoint's founder, has posted a thread at DigitalPoint Forums clearly showing his frustration with MSNBot, Microsoft Bing's search crawler. He is upset that the bot is crawling too much, too fast - causing an unnecessary spike in load on his servers.
Based on his metrics, he noticed MSNBot/2.0b was crawling at a rate of 8Mbit per second, all day, every day.
Microsoft did recently announced that this beta crawler, 2.0b (b is for beta), will be ramping activity and it seems like DigitalPoint was hit by this. You might be also, so make sure to check out your bot activity and as the Microsoft post says:
If you have any feedback for us on either the existing or the new MSNBot, or on any other matters pertaining to crawling your website, please post your comments and questions in our crawling/indexing forum. Our Webmaster Center forums moderator will follow-up with you ASAP. Please include in your forum post the identity of the user agent that is the source of your concern so we can help you that much faster. Thank you!
Microsoft's beta bots have a history of causing trouble for webmasters.
Forum discussion DigitalPoint Forums.
