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.
OVH is cheap but their anti-spam/abuse departments are ineffective. Too often they do not action blatant spam reports so in effect OVH is part of the problem with network abuse on the Internet. I’ve had to blackhole many of their netblocks while the people who run mxroute (solid email providers) have written about doing the same.
OVH needs to clean up their act.