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0 pointsAjedi326y ago0 comments

CDNs protect against DDOS by distributing request handling over a wide geographical area, filtering suspicious requests, and caching responses to avoid hammering the origin server.

Cloudflare offers all of that as a service: https://www.cloudflare.com/ddos/

You can reduce the effectiveness of DDOS in other ways, but there's only so much you can do when you're limited to a few servers with limited bandwidth. Ultimately the only way to weather a large, brute force DDOS is by having enough capacity to service all incoming requests, which is something a CDN helps provide.

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themagician6y ago

A CDN doesn’t actually help provide that for a website like 8chan. If the main server goes down, it goes down. Cloudflare will just cache old pages.

8chan wasn’t exactly designed for distributed architecture. Did you even ever use the site?

Ajedi32OP6y ago

Cloudflare does way more than just cache pages. As I said, they can also filter requests, even going so far in extreme cases as to use a captcha to validate that the one making the request is human before forwarding the request upstream to the origin server.

I've never used 8Chan, but my understanding is that it's a simple forum site, like 4Chan. That seems at a cursory glance to be feasible to run in a distributed manner; though I guess it depends on how the application itself is architected. That's kinda irrelevant though, since as I just explained a well designed CDN like Cloudflare can remove a lot of the need for the site itself to implement a distributed infrastructure. (At least so long as DDOS is the cause of your scaling issue, and not legitimate traffic.)