Isn't this the situation that Cloudflare was designed to protect against? Their service is free as well.
There are 2 kinds of DDoS attacks I know of (there are more but they're similar): bandwidth exhaustion and computer resource exhaustion.
Bandwidth exhaustion DDoS mitigation is difficult, because it requires you to have a fat inbound pipe to let all the bogus traffic through. Fat pipes are _expensive_, there are few hosting providers that allow you to have a dedicated line more than 1 Gbps.
Supposedly their Business plan ($200/month) protects against this, and their free plans protect much smaller amounts of traffic.
You can prevent against some common resource exhaustion attacks (SYN floods) by having a proper firewall setup.
CloudFlare has been known to let the attack traffic route to your server if it's big enough.
computer resource exhaustion is more likely to work then bandwidth exhaustion on CloudFlare