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.
There are alternatives. Akamai has a similar product. It’s not free, but it works. Also doesn’t require all traffic to go through them all the time, you can repoint your traffic at them on the fly and have them mitigate by scrubbing the unwanted traffic until the attack ends and then switch back, and this can be automated. My ISP at work uses this as they have large swaths of public IP address space to protect for vulnerable members.