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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

I ran a small web service in the video game industry for several years, and CloudFlare was essential to our survival, as the DDoS attacks would repeat every few weeks, and at times last 6 to 12 hours at a time. CloudFlare simply ate that up, and our customers were not impacted. Today, at a different company, different industry, we use CloudFlare for similar needs, but within physical area security networks. It's essential.

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I would not be surprised to find out that companies that have significant exposure to video game users have much higher DDOS risks.

They do, and CloudFlare has historically been part of the reason why they have such high DDoS risks. There's a bunch of "booter" sites out there which effectively sell botnet-as-a-service DDoS attacks to gamers, and those sites have relied on CloudFlare to stay online. Without that protection their competitors would DDoS their websites offline most of the time. Also, most reputable hosting and CDN services don't allow booters because they're both highly illegal and disruptive to the entire internet. CloudFlare, on the other hand, openly permits them.

We were hit hard by Chinese IP addresses. After a while we just blocked the entire Chinese IP range. Expecting script kiddies to try to hack our system, we started out with a Federal Reserve quality hardware firewall, and I suspect the presence of that security attracted attention.

Can confirm.

Don't lots of smaller hosting providers have DDoS protection? Did you try one of those and find it wasn't good enough?

No, can you link me to some of these "smaller hosting providers [that] have DDoS protection"?

In fact, I can't find any matching that description.

Hetzner does. I guess it depends how much smaller is "smaller". DDoS protection I think is one of those things that demands a certain size.

Hetzner is 20 years old company with ~300 employees and ~230,000 servers. Of course on scale of AWS, Google and others it's fairly small, but CloudFlare is not all that much larger.

Nearlyfreespeech.net

is this down voted because it's an endorsement? It's not, just an answer. https://faq.nearlyfreespeech.net/full/attack

No, but a few done, precisely because they partner with Cloudflare: https://www.bluehost.com/hosting/info/cloudflare

>> Don't lots of smaller hosting providers have DDoS protection?

It is pointless if you have a small pipe. Pipe jamming attacks are way too common and small vendors are almost always unable to cope with that.

Why are a disproportionate amount of DDoS attacks launched against video games? Serious question.

As a guess, people who are invested in games are more likely to consider themselves techy people, the competition makes everything a bit tenser and elicits more excitement, and games are explicitly online only.

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