What is it with the 16k+ hits on Peevish last month? What does it take to get rid of hits on a site?

I'm resigned to the weirdness of Yahoo and Google constantly sending "bot" and "slurp" visits my way. (How do people make sites that get "lost" on the internet? Seems to me that the second you post something anywhere online, you get hounded by search engines.)

I've been fighting back at what I can only assume are spammers for the last two weeks. (I'm hoping that if I ban "hosts" it will shut down the random, bandwidth-sucking hits.) I've shut down access to sites from a number of spam-spawning countries. I've eyed a number of other URLs suspiciously but have left them active (although I'm wondering if legit WEBTV really needs that much bandwidth).

I know it's irresponsible of me to leave the site up and unattended. I should be checking for spammers at least weekly and banning hosts and IP addresses, but I have thousands of URLs, site names, and keywords banned already and the hits just keep on coming. I can't just keep banning indiscriminately or I'm going to start accidentally locking actual human beings and friends out of this site as well as that one. (The same blacklist controls access to both.)

I also know there's no way hundreds of actual people are checking that site daily. What else can I do to lower the number of "visits" the site gets in a day?

The assumption has to be that none of those "visits" are real people. (Consequently, the assumption has to be that even back when I was posting, I should have been mentally subtracting around 500 "visits" each day to see how many actual readers I had) How do I get rid of them?

I've banned about 175 sites and/or hosts in the last two weeks. I'm waiting in breathless anticipation (at least until I forget) to see if this month's stats are any more reasonable.

I'm leaving early. I missed lunch today, and I have half an hour of being yelled at by my boss to make up for from yesterday.