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.
With my tinfoil hat on, I’d say one concern is that Cloudfare is basically a monopoly and nothing is stopping them from DDoSing sites to force them to use their product.
While it’s good to be suspicious, I don’t think we can call CloudFlare a monopoly quite yet.
Akamai is a big, giant competitor. You also have the big cloud providers like AWS that have their own CDN systems, like CloudFront. (I don’t recall GCP’s or Azure’s product names.) Then you have specialized CDNs like Google’s AMP system.
Now, is it possible that there could be a horizontal trust between these companies? Certainly. There’s few enough players for that to happen, but so far, I haven’t seen signs of it happening.