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?
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.
Everything I have read before says that there is no limit for cloudflare free.
Are you sure about that?
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.
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.
