There are many self-hosted alternatives to protect against botnet. We don't have to use cloudflare. Everthing is under their control!
Whatever you do, unless you have their bandwidth capacity, at some point those "self-hosted" will get flooded with traffic.
The fact that cloudflare can literally ready every bit of communication (as it sits between the client and your server) is already plenty bad. And yet, we accept this more easily, then a bit of downtime. We shall not ask about the prices for that service ;)
To me its nothing more then the whole "everybody on the cloud" issue, when most do not need the resource that cloud companies like AWS provide (and the bill), and yet, get totally tied down to this one service.
I am getting old lol ...
What is the cost of many-9s uptime from Cloudflare? For DDoS protection it is $0/month on their free tier:
Its free as long as you really are small, not worth milking. The moment you can afford to run your own mini dc at your office, you start to enter the "well, hello there" for CF.
As someone who has (and is) runs (running) a DC with all the electrical/UPS, cooling, piping, HVAC+D stuff to deal with: it can be a lot of just time/overhead.
Especially if you don't have a number of folks in-house to deal with all that 'non-IT' equipment (I'm a bit strange in that I have an interest in both IT and HVAC-y stuff).
The bandwidth costs of a ddos alone would close down a small shop.
Cloudflare provide an incredibly good service with a great track record, and sometimes shit happens.
What would some good examples of those be? I think something like Anubis is mostly against bot scraping, not sure how you'd mitigate a DDoS attack well with self-hosted infra if you don't have a lot of resources?
On that note, what would be a good self-hosted WAF? I recall using mod_security with Apache and the OWASP ruleset, apparently the Nginx version worked a bit slower (e.g. https://www.litespeedtech.com/benchmarks/modsecurity-apache-... ), there was also the Coraza project but I haven't heard much about it https://coraza.io/ or maybe the people who say that running a WAF isn't strictly necessary also have a point (depending on the particular attack surface).
Genuine questions.
There is haproxy-protection, which I believe is the basis of Kiwiflare. Clients making new connections have to solve a proof-of-work challenge that take about 3 seconds of compute time.
Enterprise: https://www.haproxy.com/solutions/ddos-protection-and-rate-l...
How they magically manage DDOS larger than their bandwidth?
If the plan is to have larger bandwidth than any DDOS it is going to be expensive, quickly.
If you're just renting servers instead, you have a few options that are effectively closer to a 1% commit, but better have a plan B for when your upstreams drop you if the incoming attack traffic starts disrupting other customers - see Neoprotect having to shut down their service last month.