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I disagree with people saying these types of attacks can't be prevented if you switched hosts. I'm sure Google+cloudflare[0] would keep your website online. AWS

I disagree with people saying these types of attacks can't be prevented if you switched hosts. I'm sure Google+cloudflare[0] would keep your website online. AWS also if you had the cash. The amount of distributed traffic happening right now against linode would probably only represent a 5% increase in traffic to a popular Google product. At least you know they have the expertise. Nothing against the very smart and talented linode engineers, but the two companies are on very different levels of traffic engineering. [0] https://www.cloudflare.com/google/ https://www.cloudflare.com/google/

the_duke 10y ago
Google and AWS probably have sophisticated DDOS mitigation (can anyone comment on this?) and you can scale up pretty quickly. But if your service is the direct target of the attack (as opposed to the whole provider) and your servers are getting hammered... Even if you architecture allows quick horizontal scaling, you still face a tough decision. The attack could go on for days, and the hosting costs can go really high really fast. Which can be catastrophic for a small company.
- user5994461 10y ago
  Attacks are rarely targeted to the hosting providers. They usually target a specific customer. Google/AWS probably have 100 times the capacity (and redundancy and architecture reliability and failover and awesomeness) of linode. That means that, first, they can't be put down easily, second, a DDoS is limited to a small subset of the infrastructure and doesn't bleed to every customers and services. As for traditional hosting companies (OVH and the likes) When you're being DDoSed, they'll null-route your IP space. (i.e. they advertise your IPs as dont-exist-on-the-internet-anymore). The traffic is dropped while in transit on the internet because it can't go anywhere. It doesn't reach the hosting company anymore. Note: being null-routed means your site and all your services are off the internet and thus effectively dead. As for CloudFlare. They have many locations all around the world and they can absorb a lot of traffic, to the point they themselves cannot be DDoS. They have active monitoring and mitigation against common attacks and known malicious sources, which may prevent the attack without even you knowing about it. When you're under attack, you can block subnet/AS/countries in cloudflare settings, or request a challenge/capcha from every visitors. Cloudflare will reject visitors (with or without challenging them) at their edge location before any traffic can get to you. It is very effective from my experience. Generally speaking. The only way to stop a DDoS is to do it before it reaches your datacenters so you need help from your ISP/provider/CDN. Edit: The attack that put down linode last christmas was against linode itself and not a specific customer. Part of the mitigation included linode moving its critical services behind cloudflare :D
  - iMerNibor 10y ago
    > As for traditional hosting companies (OVH and the likes) When you're being DDoSed, they'll null-route your IP space. (i.e. they advertise your IPs as dont-exist-on-the-internet-anymore). The traffic is dropped while in transit on the internet because it can't go anywhere. It doesn't reach the hosting company anymore. OVH hasn't been doing this for a while, they got some beefy ddos protection setup for this exact reason - it was way too easy to take down someone for hours Hetzner (another big european hosting provider) followed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12403783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12403783 Online.net also has included protection (+ paid upgrades) At least here in europe the big hosting providers are all switching to providing included protection for all their customers, at least for traffic intensive attacks which hurt everyone

the_duke 10y ago

Google and AWS probably have sophisticated DDOS mitigation (can anyone comment on this?) and you can scale up pretty quickly. But if your service is the direct target of the attack (as opposed to the whole provider) and your servers are getting hammered... Even if you architecture allows quick horizontal scaling, you still face a tough decision. The attack could go on for days, and the hosting costs can go really high really fast. Which can be catastrophic for a small company.

user5994461 10y ago
Attacks are rarely targeted to the hosting providers. They usually target a specific customer. Google/AWS probably have 100 times the capacity (and redundancy and architecture reliability and failover and awesomeness) of linode. That means that, first, they can't be put down easily, second, a DDoS is limited to a small subset of the infrastructure and doesn't bleed to every customers and services. As for traditional hosting companies (OVH and the likes) When you're being DDoSed, they'll null-route your IP space. (i.e. they advertise your IPs as dont-exist-on-the-internet-anymore). The traffic is dropped while in transit on the internet because it can't go anywhere. It doesn't reach the hosting company anymore. Note: being null-routed means your site and all your services are off the internet and thus effectively dead. As for CloudFlare. They have many locations all around the world and they can absorb a lot of traffic, to the point they themselves cannot be DDoS. They have active monitoring and mitigation against common attacks and known malicious sources, which may prevent the attack without even you knowing about it. When you're under attack, you can block subnet/AS/countries in cloudflare settings, or request a challenge/capcha from every visitors. Cloudflare will reject visitors (with or without challenging them) at their edge location before any traffic can get to you. It is very effective from my experience. Generally speaking. The only way to stop a DDoS is to do it before it reaches your datacenters so you need help from your ISP/provider/CDN. Edit: The attack that put down linode last christmas was against linode itself and not a specific customer. Part of the mitigation included linode moving its critical services behind cloudflare :D
- iMerNibor 10y ago
  > As for traditional hosting companies (OVH and the likes) When you're being DDoSed, they'll null-route your IP space. (i.e. they advertise your IPs as dont-exist-on-the-internet-anymore). The traffic is dropped while in transit on the internet because it can't go anywhere. It doesn't reach the hosting company anymore. OVH hasn't been doing this for a while, they got some beefy ddos protection setup for this exact reason - it was way too easy to take down someone for hours Hetzner (another big european hosting provider) followed recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12403783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12403783 Online.net also has included protection (+ paid upgrades) At least here in europe the big hosting providers are all switching to providing included protection for all their customers, at least for traffic intensive attacks which hurt everyone