To start with, I’m sorry, you’re right. There are some blocks. An explanation why I thought there were none is provided below:
I checked further and while I can still see requests from that IP (to other sites, but I don’t see any request today), I did notice there were no requests from that IP to your site (that I got from the error message you shared above) and the timelines did match. So I checked even further and we are indeed blocking that IP from time to time which is why I’m still able to see the requests.
Here’s what’s happening: One of the sites on Netlify (the same site that I mentioned who wrote into the helpdesk in my initial response) is making a lot of requests. This is resulting in the IP being banned, but we unban the IP after some time, thus some requests ending up successful.
Currently, I’ve reached out to the user to ask what exactly on their end is causing so many requests and if they can control it. I advise you to use a different IP or your current solution works too. As long as your IP ends up being unique than other users using the platform, I think it should be fine. But to be certain, how many users are you expecting when you say “high volumes”?
This is not related to the issue, but I thought it’s important to address it regardless:
I don’t treat any question as silly and I apologise if you got that idea through the conversation. We get several requests about IPs being blocked, and our typical workflow is checking if we’re serving traffic to that IP. If yes, that’s indicative of no block. This is the same thing I did here. Since I could see over 200k requests in the past 7 days, there did not seem like an issue. It’s only when I checked the logs for your specific site, I saw an issue and as I mentioned before, seeing an issue on our end is enough to triggeer a deeper investigation, which I did now.
The only problem I do face quite often is the lack of information shared by the user. Without any indentifying information, it’s not possible for me to check anything specific to their site. As soon as you shared that info, I was able to check further.
Also, there was no reluctance to engage here, but before finding out about the issue, if we were only going to engage in a war of words, it was going to lead to frustration on my end, and and bad customer experience on your end. So, I thought it probably makes sense for someone else to check the issue as I was certainly unable to see it (for reasons explained above) and you seemed to be perfectly sure that there was an issue.