We ran in to this issue earlier this morning. One of our web servers started hit heavily with spam in the form of automated web posting bots. Since we are hosting forums, 99.9% of the load was centered around MySQL. To quickly stop the spam without having to wait an hour for MySQL to shut down, we ran a “killall -9 httpd” to stop all new incoming web requests and existing request from processing.
Let’s face it, with all of the security breaches these days, encryption is becoming a standard on the internet. With modern servers having multiple 8 and 12 core CPUs, the overhead generated by implementing SSL is negligible. I always buy my SSL certificates from Comodo PositiveSSL through Namecheap. The reason for this is you can get a signed SSL certificate with 99.9% compatibility for only $9.00 per year. There is one annoyance though. Comodo doesn’t have good documentation on installing these certificates! Follow this quick tutorial and you’ll have SSL running in no time.