I am a plebe who doesn’t understand these things but what exactly does cloudflare do? I see it popping up more and more often redirecting before visiting a site. I assume that this has something to do with bot traffic? It seems like every mention of cloudflare is about how it ruined someone’s day.
Hmmh, I’d like to - at some point - speak to an admin who has been targeted by a DDoS attack. I know it happened to one Lemmy instance. What I’ve seen as an admin were some attempts that weren’t that bad for us, and that was years ago. It didn’t even really stop the service, just cause lots of load on the webserver and made the website open a bit slower than usual. And it was over after a few hours and never happened again. My other servers and websites have never been targeted.
And I wonder if for example the Lemmy instances who use Cloudflare, pay them $240 a year. Because as I read, Cloudflare free ceases service if there is an ongoing DDoS attack.
I think it’s mostly Live-Streamers and somewhat high-profile and controversial webservers who get targeted. Like the biggest Lemmy instances. Or if you’re successful at messing with the Russian internet trolls. Or play a game in a live stream and your fans like to seriously mess with you, like pay for a virtual attack or swat you. Other than that, I believe 99.9% of people who run internet services will never experience such an attack. And it wouldn’t really harm them if their service went down for some time.