> It's just a conference brochure site.

That’s exactly why it should be resilient. A fully static text-heavy site can serve basically unlimited traffic on a free host or a $5 VPS these days.

I agree. Protecting against DDoS attacks is incredibly difficult. I'm just enjoying the irony of Def Con, the premiere computer security and hacking convention, not being able to handle traffic.

To be fair, I don't think they crashed; I saw a "sorry too much traffic try later" type message. Still amuses me.

the current way to most effectively get around DDoS seems to be using a proof-of-work based frontend run on as many revolving reverse proxies around the world as you can afford. this is what kiwifarms does. seems pretty effective and a lot cheaper than what the people bankrolling the attacks on them are spending.

Of course, a robust and easily-scaled infrastructure is pretty easy to rent these days...

... if you're willing to trust another company with your data.

An HN front page “DDoS” is like 20K hits. This isn't some complex scaling challenge. Any website on the internet should be able to handle it, especially a purely informational one.

I had my blog be on the front page for ~6-8 hours racking up 100k+ unique loads. It also managed to survive just fine on a $5 VPS so I would hope that other sites could survive.