Your Apache server reaching the MaxClients doesn’t imply that your site is hacked… it may suggest that you’re getting lots of web traffic It’s also possible that a particular page on your site is taking a long time to complete (or some combination of the above!).
So, determining the problem… could your site have been advertised somewhere that generates a lot of traffic?
It’s also possible that it’s related to a denial of service attack.
What you can do is look in the Apache logfiles (~/logs/access_log), and see what sort of information is in there.
Do you see one particular IP address showing up repeatedly? If so, that IP may be causing the problem, and you may want to block them.
if you buy traffic then you get traffic.
is your server optimised to receive a lot of traffic?
If not you may want a HTML landing page as it would be serve up the quickest
Well, I would probably try and spend some time figuring out what exactly those IP’s are accessing. Amongst other things, you can do as Ronald mentioned and put up a static HTML site if they’re hitting a particular part of your website hard.
However, if you’re looking to block some IP’s, there’s a number of ways to do that… an easy way is with the “route” command.
To block the 10.0.0.0 network, for example, you can type this command as root:
route add -net 10.0.0.0 netmask 255.0.0.0 reject
Just make sure you really don’t want that traffic before blocking the IP’s