ia_archiver DOS attack

I had to send alexa the following message tomnight after suffering a Denial Of Service attach from Alexa. They have been hitting me about 5 times a second for quite a while now and it does not look as if it is going to ease up.

Your ia_archiver robot is hitting my website 5 times a second.
www.uklug.co.uk

This is crazy, please stop it now. I have now added it to the robots.txt file. Don't you know that a what you are doing to my server is against the law. I can hardly use it at all. Get seomeone in the tech department to fire the idiot who wrote/runs that spider, their clueless.

I blocked them using mod_rewrite and my advice to anyone that has more than a few pages would be to do the same. They are not playing the same ball game as google and yahoo, they obviously don't give a damn about the people on the recieveing end of these attacks. Put the following in you .htaccess file.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} ^.*ia_archiver.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^.*$ - [F]

They recommend adding the following to your robots.txt file.

User-agent: ia_archiver
Disallow: /

I have heard that it is sometimes ignored though so my advice it to block them for good using mod_rewrite. They are only leeching the data or their own gain anyway. At least google forwards you some traffic.