djkrul

UPnP is enabled on lots of routers by default and enables devices and services behind NAT to forward traffic for specific ports to their internal IP address to allow direct connections from the internet.

FastNetMon is kind of a hammer: inbound traffic to $x is exceeding bps or pps threshold -> trigger mitigation for $x (i.e. a remote blackhole). This is generally good enough to defend against the least sophisticated and most common attacks such as NTP, SSDP, DNS amplification attacks. Then there's a long tail of other attack types are not volumetric in nature and are more difficult to detect. That's a big part of what you pay for when you buy a commercial solution.

Then once an attack has been identified you want to specify mitigation policies: Customer A gets full mitigation, but customer B needs to be blackholed instead. If an attack is smaller than 10Gbps you want to simply insert some flowspec rules into your edge routers, but if the attack pattern is too random you will have to redirect a /32 to a specialized scrubbing device instead. Larger attacks you might want to announce through a DDoS protection service so you announce the /24 containing that IP address to your DDoS protection service to reduce bandwidth on your own uplinks, and so on. I could go on, I hope you get the idea :)

None, but it's a nice alternative for those on a small budget who would otherwise have nothing at all.

We have an auto-scaling feature in private beta over at https://www.tilaa.com. Drop us a line if you want to test! Ask for me (Dennis) if you need implementation assistance.

You can either use VM snapshots or our metadata service (cloud-init compatible) to provision new instances automatically. We also have an API, but you don't need it for autoscaling.

We're a European cloud provider (based in the Netherlands) and don't have PoPs in the US though.

I have successfully bootstrapped a VPS / cloud hosting company with my 2 partners while my wife was pregnant of our first. We've had two more in the years after. Me and my wife both work 4 days so we can each spend a day a week with the kids (and weekends are reserved family time too).

I started coding in my spare time and me and my partners only quit the day jobs when the company was pretty much self-sustaining. 7 years later we are an established and fast growing company (and if you're Dutch: We're hiring! https://www.tilaa.com/en/jobs ;).

I'm not sure if things are much different in the US (I'm from the Netherlands), but I definitely think it's possible to have it both (a loving family and a flourishing business) without making big sacrifices.