Key Takeaways
After leaving GoDaddy for a private host, a small U.K.-based publication, Anglican Mainstream (AM), saw a sudden spike in international visitors. Close to 80% of its traffic now comes from outside the U.K., including 65 daily website visits originating from China.
The website was frozen by GoDaddy in February due to copyright infringement, though AM rejects this claim, saying the removal was due to its orthodox Anglican commentary.
After weeks without a site, a U.K. businessman offered to privately host AM. Since the transition, its co-founder, Canon Dr. Chris Sugden, said the spike was the positive outcome of leaving GoDaddy.
“What initially felt like a disaster — even a spiritual attack — has proved to be God’s means of placing us on a firmer technological footing and extending our reach far beyond what we imagined,” he said.
It’s a dangerous assumption. Why would non-U.K. readers be regularly accessing a Church of England site? And why would Chinese readers be interested in a Christian site written in English?
Why Traffic Spiked After Leaving GoDaddy
These days, sudden traffic spikes aren’t always new visitors, so what AM saw after its migration is not much of a surprise anymore.
For the first time, automated traffic has officially surpassed human activity: Imperva’s 2025 Bad Bot Report found that bots now account for more than half of all web traffic.
And recently, site owners using Google Analytics (GA4) say they’ve seen sudden traffic spikes attributed to places like China and Singapore.
Google’s analytics platform records any site action as “events,” such as page_view and session_start, or as simple as scrolling and clicking.
While those events are logged by GA4, they don’t require a full page load, which tells you what the browsing visitor is actually doing. And that just makes it so much easier for bots to fly under the radar.
It’s not uncommon for modern day automated tools to route through IP ranges in these regions.
SEO sites like DefiniteSEO, for example, found that sudden GA4 traffic spikes in these regions are almost always “inauthentic sessions from automated systems,” which show typical bot patterns (low engagement, high bounce rates).
Since China and Singapore are major hosting hubs, they’re commonly used by VPN services, hosting providers, and bulk automated tools.
And hosting migrations make these kinds of analytics even more skewed because when a site moves, its DNS and IP records also change. Those kinds of changes will attract crawlers, scanners, and bots.
It’s easy to misread “good” news like this, so hosts need to make sure they’ve turned on bot filtering and rate limiting — and yes, they’re protections many managed hosts already apply, but they can be especially easy to miss during migrations.
