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Hello guys, so I have been self hosting a bunch of stuff for some years now. But I want to increase the protection of the services I host.

I was thinking of using a VPS just for ddos protecting my services like game servers, web servers, email etc.

Any suggestion on how to set this up well? I was thinking of routing all traffic from the VPS back home with wireguard. My connection is gigabit so I don't think the performance impact will be too big, any suggestion on which proxy, VPS and other things to use?

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[-] slazer2au@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago

Don't. Ddos will overwhelm any single server, do you really think a 1/10/25Gb interface can handle a small 50Gb/s attack?

What you can do is host a VPS with a company that has ddos protections, but I doubt that is standard, and ddos protection works best from a network operator level not a host one.

[-] kylian0087@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 month ago

That's what I meant. Hosting the VPS at a company with ddos protection. So the VPS can take the hit instead of my home connection.

[-] irmadlad@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

You could do it that way. You could use something like Cloudflare Tunnels/Zero Trust where you'd get DDoS protection for tunneled hostnames http/https. If you're looking for raw tcp/udp arbitrary ports protection, they have a paid Spectrum protection plan.

I don't know your specific situation, but after all these years of self hosting, I can't say as I've ever experienced a DDoS attack. Not saying they don't happen or that it isn't a concern. I've experienced someone hacking my server, but I was super green back then and undoubtedly didn't have the proper protections in order.

Most of your reputable, well established VPS vendors like Digital Ocean, Linode, Vultr, offer DDoS protections. Some like Hetzner offer multiple tiers of DDoS protection.

[-] algernon@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 month ago

Depends on what kind of DDoS OP wants to defend against. Defending against an AI crawler DDoS is entirely possible with a tiny VPS. I've been doing that for the past ~1.5 years on a €4/month CX23 Hetzner VPS.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 6 points 1 month ago

You cannot stop a DDOS, you can only mitigate one with more capacity. That's why there are only a few big players who can do it.

Canonical itself was unable to stop a DDOS attack and they're distributed. You won't stop a DDOS if that DDOS is meant for you.

[-] Maroon@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

If you see my old posts, you'll see that I had this exact concern.

I have since learnt that pulling a DDoS attack is actually quite resource intensive / expensive to the deployer as well, and unless you believe that you are being targeted because of something very valuable you host or that you have a technically inclined enemy who is specifically out to get you, you should be fine. Have a good think about your threat model.

With regard to bots, scrapers and the likes, yes, they are a real pain. That can be tackled with Anubis + BadBotBlocker + Fail2Ban + some custom rate limits.

I assume you are a lot more experienced than me based on the number of things you have listed to have self hosted. I feel a well configured reverse proxy with the tools I suggested will take care of 95% of all your not and scraper related worries.

[-] lemongarlic@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Wouldn't anubis be effective against DDOS attacks?

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

No, Anubis creates a throttle to stop ai scrapers from taking down https web resources.

[-] lemongarlic@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

Sure but I would think Anubis would also somewhat stop DDOS attacks since clients need to pass Anubis to access the website and across a DDOS swarm that would use up significant resources.

[-] non_burglar@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

DDOS attacks do not always happen on https, though. You can overwhelm a system with DNS, NTP, or even just malformed packets. Anubis would do nothing for this.

[-] auzy1@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

Why would someone DDoS you?

[-] Oha@lemmy.ohaa.xyz 3 points 1 month ago

Been hosting Public Websites and Gameservers since 2020 from my residential connection and never got ddosed in that time

[-] IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf 0 points 1 month ago
[-] auzy1@lemmy.world 2 points 1 month ago

Is there some new kind of DDoS attack that steals Bitcoins instantaneously?

[-] IAMgROOT@lemmy.wtf 1 points 1 month ago

no but you can get paid to ddos someone

[-] frongt@lemmy.zip -2 points 1 month ago
[-] algernon@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 month ago

I'm using a setup similar to what you had in mind: I have a small €4/month VPS as my front, with scrapers taken care of by iocaine (it both blocks them, and firewalls the worst off automatically). That's over 90% of the HTTP(s) traffic never making it past the VPS, greatly reducing the traffic into my home network. My actual servers are behind a WireGuard tunnel.

It does not protect against a non-HTTP DDoS, but that wasn't part of my threat model to begin with. My VPS provider (Hetzner) has DDoS protection even for €4/month servers - that doesn't include the scraper DDoS, but includes other kinds - I have luckily not been a victim of any, so no idea whether it works reliably.

Against the scrapers, a VPS + bot defense + Wireguard works like a charm. Can recommend.

[-] deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de 2 points 1 month ago

I have a setup similar to this, but not for ddos protection. If I were to get ddossed at a network level, my home connection wouldn't feel much of it, as my VPS quickly gets overloaded. I have been "ddossed" at an application level though, I hate AI web scrapers. Since the entire line from VPS to my home network is 1gbps, that alongside most of my server cpu resources got oversaturated with fake traffic.

(I say ddosed in quotes, because I'm not sure of the intentions of these AI webscrapers. Thousands of requests per second on a server that's usually seeing maybe 5 isn't "normal" traffic either.)

[-] eodur@piefed.social 2 points 1 month ago

Take a look at towonel. It's relatively new, but very promising. I plan to migrate to it from cloudflare.

this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
33 points (97.1% liked)

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