Ddos

Using a CDN at home for free!

Cloudflare are nice enough to provide a free tier to their CDN service which is perfect for those of us that still host websites at home. The free teir provides some basic benefits - DDOS protection and caching. Check out the details here - https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/#overview

If you utilize their tunneling solution, you’ll also be able to host websites behind a dynamic IP. You’ll no longer need a static IP. This means the traffic goes like so;

nginx - setup as reverse proxy

Previously to take down this wordpress site all you needed to do was hold down F5 for about 20 seconds then the site would take about 5 mins to recover.

There were a few factors causing this and quite a few different methods to solving the problem. Wordpress itself is run on php / apache, apache has an evasive mod which can block certain IPs depending on the defined abusive behavior (typical DDOS attack). Since i like to run a few websites behind a single IP i looked at fixing the issue closer to the perimeter….