That’s what I got this past year. That’s more than triple the previous year, and more than ten times what I got four years ago.
The level has gotten so great that the blog crashes about once a day; it’s practically a DDOS attack. Something will have to be done — but short of paying for very much more expensive hosting, I’m not at all clear what would be. I use Akismet and a javascript-based test too.
This combination worked fine for a decade. Now I’m getting overwhelmed. Over the past decade, 99.67% of my comments have been spam. I could turn off comments — it’s not like I’m overwhelmed with real ones these days — but I’d hate to do that.
CloudFlare? Akamai recently bought out Prolexic, which does much the same thing as Cloudflare, so (if they haven’t already) you should be able to buy some security package from Akamai that does the sort of traffic segregation that you’d want in order to survive a DDoS type flood. Doesn’t do much good if it’s just a high volume of comment spam, though — it’s too tough to see that it IS spam until after it’s submitted and can be parsed, and by that time, you’ve already spent the bandwidth and processing cost.