If Paul blocked Alibaba, how are they still getting access?
They're not. The logs contain multiple days worth of entries. They only showed up on the second day because they exceeded almost every other IP in their accesses. Here's today's top ten. You'll notice that Alibaba is not among them.
3279 136.35.144.129 - Google Fiber Inc
2503 199.47.82.21 - Turnitin LLC
2503 199.47.82.20 - Turnitin LLC
1295 66.249.73.5 - Google LLC
1218 207.193.207.96 - AT&T Enterprises, LLC
1068 57.140.28.59 - MENLO SECURITY INC.
951 104.173.80.3 - Charter Communications Inc
925 67.248.197.51 - Charter Communications Inc
917 136.36.182.189 - Google Fiber Inc.
878 50.103.198.242 - Frontier Communications of America, Inc.
What this should tell you is that at least half of the traffic to any website on the internet comes from professional internet companies probing sites for various reasons, not from the legitimate traffic of users accessing the site. Google, should be obvious. Turnitin is a plagiarism monitoring site. Menlo Security is a web security company.
Between the professionals, the scammers, and the hackers, probably two-thirds of the traffic on the internet is not consumers. Maybe more. And our servers have to deal with all of that crap and still provide you with a decent experience, or you'll stop coming.
