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.
It costs more money right?
Not necessarily. I have several servers behind Cloudflare for free. I’m just limited on analytics, some advanced firewall settings, advanced cache management and maybe a few other features that I don’t use. But the basic service is free.
https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/free/
Nothings free, someone’s paying cloudflare something to operate
I imagine this is more of a “If we give people the basic stuff for free when they are small, they are more likely to buy our better stuff when they grow and need to update”