Steven Zahm@ roy
Hmmm, interesting, the links are marked as nofollow but it sounds like a bot that scanned that pages is hitting them. If that is the case, since the link is in the bots db it’ll keep hitting them until it reindexes the page and removes the link from its index because it is no longer on the source page.
It’s also odd that this would be the cause of heavy traffic. The vCard is created and sent very early in the WordPress execution stack. Basically meaning, much less resource intensive than a normal page load.
Can you host tell what is hitting the links and how often … this info would be in you’re sites access logs.
Question … how many entries per page do you have your directory set to? I took a look at the directory, it seems like it is around 50. That’s at the top end max that I recommend. This actually could be the source of the 408 errors. That really depends on the host. Listing that many does require resources … same would happen if you listed that many WordPress posts per page, so it is not a connections related issue. If you want that many, and it is the source of the error, you might want to look at a plugin like WP Rocket.
Oh, almost forgot… you can use an .htaccess file to block hits to the /vcard/ page. That’ll be the easiest solution.
I hope that helps, let me know!