Today, like the past few days, we have had some downtime. Apparently some script kids are enjoying themselves by targeting our server (and others). Sorry for the inconvenience.
Most of these ‘attacks’ are targeted at the database, but some are more ddos-like and can be mitigated by using a CDN. Some other Lemmy servers are using Cloudflare, so we know that works. Therefore we have chosen Cloudflare as CDN / DDOS protection platform for now. We will look into other options, but we needed something to be implemented asap.
For the other attacks, we are using them to investigate and implement measures like rate limiting etc.
Yeah, this is just growing pains for any website. Get popular enough for it to be “fun” to target. Then get enough data that it’s “profitable” to target. Etc. And the usual way to deal is to first use an external solution at least until it becomes too expensive due to traffic volume. Then make your own solutions for problems you can solve yourself and pay external companies for the ones you can’t.