Random websites appear in Nginx access.log

Hello,

This has actually happened to me in the past, I had a Droplet and I was seeing GET requests to a random domain name in my access logs. It turned out that the domain name was abandoned but it was still pointing to my Droplet’s IP address.

What I did was to create a server block and deny the access for this specific hostname, so it looked something like this:

server {
	listen 80;

	index index.html index.htm index.nginx-debian.html;

	server_name some_domain_name.com;

	location / {
		deny all;
	}
}

That way if anyone tries to access that domain name pointed to my server, they would get a 403 Forbidden message.

On another note what I could also suggest is checking your Nginx config and making sure that you don’t actually have that domain name specified in there:

sudo grep -rl 'wx.sina.com.cn' /etc/nginx/*

Hope that this helps. Regards, Bobby