this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2024
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Best Privacy DDOS Blocking? (self.selfhosted)
submitted 3 months ago by secretlyaddictedtolinux to c/selfhosted
21 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I am considering hosting something and am concerned about DDOS attacks.

I am morally opposed to cloudflare because I think they are an unethical and shitty company.

What privacy focused solutions are there to reduce the likelihood of a successful DDOS attack?

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[–] just_another_person 18 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You're being downvoted because you're asking another "I want everything, but works exactly to my needs, only the way I want it, and cheap." kind of question.

Cloudflare exists for a reason, as does every other DDOS mitigation platform. If there was a better or cheaper solution, they would be out of business already.

Best you're probably going to do for self-hosting is going to be blackholing abusive connections, but even then you're only going to be able to mitigate so much. Differentiation of mass amounts traffic still takes a massive amount of time and compute.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 months ago

To add for people who might not be up on the technical aspects: DDOS mitigation works only if you have absolutely enormous amounts of bandwidth and compute resources to intercept and scrub the traffic.

It's not some magic wand someone is waving at a server and poof the DDOS disappears; it still comes into a datacenter, hits a server and is then mitigated before making it to your actual host.

So you have to invest in enough bandwidth and hardware to outscale the largest DDOS you're expecting, which is going to be far less than what's going to REALLY happen, and it has to be available even when nothing is going on.

It's expensive to offer, expensive to run, and only really gets "affordable" at the scale of someone like Cloudflare or Akamai or a hyperscaler.

It's either private, good, or cheap: pick one, maybe two.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You don't have to worry about DDoS:

  • DDoS is an advanced technique and the people who can do that spend a lot of time and effort putting malware on machines that can be ordered to perform DDoS on command. They usually sell that attack capability and it ends up getting used against worthy targets, we're talking attacks that disrupt entire industries, elections, warfare etc. Do you really think what you'll be hosting will attract that kind of attention and be impossible to take down with simpler methods?
  • To survive a DDoS attack you need a lot of resources, from a professional platform (like CloudFlare). The stuff they offer for free is not going to get you through a DDoS. If you'll read their terms you'll see it's worded just ambiguously enough to mean nothing. If you ever actually get targeted by an actual DDoS and you haven't paid a lot of money to a platform like that, everybody will simply drop you instantly (your ISP, your VPS provider, your tunnel provider, your VPN provider etc.) and possibly kick you off their service too.

If the stuff you'll be hosting is static files you can use a CDN service. CDN's are designed to be distributed and redundant so they're somewhat resilient to DoS attacks by default. They'll still kick you off if it gets to be too much but maybe you can weather shorter/moderate attacks.

If you're hosting a dynamic/interactive service forget about it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Everything I have read before says that there is no limit for cloudflare free.

Are you sure about that?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Use your common sense. They're not going to expend any significant resources to keep up a free website.

They have a small capacity available for mitigating DoS for free accounts together, while resources last. If you happen to fit in that capacity at any given time that's nice, if you don't, you go down.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Do you have a source for all your claims?

Everything I can find online says that cloudflare DDOS protection is unlimited and unmetered on their free plan. https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/

But honestly, even if you are not prioritised I doubt Cloudflare will ever run out of resources due to ddos attacks. And if they did the whole internet is pretty much down anyways.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Then why do they offer a separate, distinct DDoS mitigation feature on the enterprise plans? And did you notice they call them "mitigation" and not "protection"? 🙂

Look at the description of each one, the free one "stops illegitimate traffic at the edge". Meaning they'll serve from cache, it's not getting through to your actual site. You can get caching from any CDN service, it doesn't have to be CF. All CDN services are distributed and will try to serve for as long as possible because their whole purpose is to deal with traffic spikes.

And if you want to know for how long CF (or any service) will serve from cache and how far they'll go for an account (especially a free account), you want to check the terms of service not the plans. The plans are made to sell to you, the fine print is in the terms.

Anyway, I really don't understand people's obsession with DDoS, particularly self-hosting people. The chances of their little website ever being the target of a DDoS are astronomical. Many of them don't take proper backups, and don't worry about theft or fire or electric spikes, which are far more likely, but go frantic when they hear about features they'll never use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Because that is a different feature.

And did you notice they call them "mitigation" and not "protection"? 🙂

Yeah, typo on my part.

You claim that Cloudflare doesn't live up to their words. Please cite where in the terms of services it says that the DDOS mitigation is limited on the free plan or sources of free customers being affected by this. Or are you just saying "read the fine print" without having read them yourself and you are just using that as some magic way to win all arguments?

Anyway, I really don't understand people's obsession with DDoS, particularly self-hosting people. The chances of their little website ever being the target of a DDoS are astronomical. Many of them don't take proper backups, and don't worry about theft or fire or electric spikes, which are far more likely, but go frantic when they hear about features they'll never use.

Yeah, I absolutely agree and I have said that to some in this post. But it's even more worthless to argue about the free plan. It's not like some private person is ever gonna be DDOSed so aggressively that Cloudflare would even notice. If an enterprise (like where I work) is in real need of ddos protection they would already be on the enterprise plan or they would be forced to it by Cloudflare.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I wouldn't worry about DDOS attacks at all.

People simply don't care about whatever small website you plan on hosting. Unless it's something extremely controversial and you gain a lot of exposure suddenly.

It's worth worrying about if you ever get big but until then just forget it.

I.E. do something about it when/if it happens and not before. A ddos is fairly harmless unless you need to stay up for some reason (and you don't need to stay up).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

I'd set-up a static website on an AWS S3 bucket. Then you can use AWS Cloudfront to distribute access around the planet.

Cost is mostly negligible unless you are serving big files.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

What's your budget?

[–] secretlyaddictedtolinux -3 points 3 months ago (4 children)

As little as possible. This will probably be a low traffic site. I just want something cheap and not cloudflare.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

I don't think there is anything else free. Best you can do is host with someone like ovh that has enough resources to provide basic protection.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

You're not really at risk of DDOS in that case, I wouldn't worry about it.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago

Why would someone want to ddos ur small site, real ddos is extremely expensive attack,

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Make your website all static files (if you can) and host on a CDN like Bunny.net. It's $1/month and your website might actually be able to get through some large traffic spikes. It won't work against a targeted sustained DDoS but like the other comments said that's not likely to happen.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

Fewer Letters More Letters
CF CloudFlare
HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web
VPN Virtual Private Network
VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting)
nginx Popular HTTP server

4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 9 acronyms.

[Thread #906 for this sub, first seen 4th Aug 2024, 21:15] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]

[–] abominable_panda 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Crowdsec?

[–] NocturnalEngineer 2 points 3 months ago

It wouldn't stop against volumetric attacks...

They'd still fully consume the WAN bearer regardless of Crowdsec protecting the endpoint. For that you need a scrubbing centre to dump the traffic onto.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

If you don’t want to go full Cloudflare you can mitigate DDOS using these kind of technique locally.

https://blog.nginx.org/blog/mitigating-ddos-attacks-with-nginx-and-nginx-plus

Cloudflare will be a lot more effective in case of attack. But I don’t think most people need more than a few mitigation rules. If DDOS really come, there are very few things you could do to mitigate anyway.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 months ago

why downvote 🤔