Comment by bwb
9 years ago
That is kinda a BS statement, there are hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there in some form. I am not sure where he is getting such a BS statement.
9 years ago
That is kinda a BS statement, there are hundreds of thousands of web hosts out there in some form. I am not sure where he is getting such a BS statement.
From the linked post:
> The size and scale of the attacks that can now easily be launched online make it such that if you don't have a network like Cloudflare in front of your content, and you upset anyone, you will be knocked offline. In fact, in the case of the Daily Stormer, the initial requests we received to terminate their service came from hackers who literally said: "Get out of the way so we can DDoS this site off the Internet."
As far as I know, he's right. It's basically only Cloudflare, Google, and a handful of other megacorps that can keep your content online if someone's willing to pay a vigilante with a botnet to get rid of it.
I don't think that's true. Cloudflare is just the most visible option at the moment, and probably (one of) the most cost effective.
His point is that with the amount of DDoS power available out there to various parties, without a major ISP or CDN hosting your content you can trivially be booted off the internet. Once you accept that as a given, if one of the major ISP or CDN networks won't host your content, then you're open to censorship from anyone who doesn't like your message, which if your controversial enough that the ISPs and CDNs won't host you it's probably a given that someone is going to want to DDoS you out of existence. To further complicate things, most small ISPs when faced with a substantial and prolonged DDoS of one of the clients, will terminate that client in order to preserve service to their other clients, which means once again if you aren't being fronted by a major ISP or CDN will likely mean you'll be hoping from ISP to ISP until eventually nobody will be willing to host your content.
I think the point is, if you make a site forgo any sort of DDOS protection it effectively does not exist, especially if DDOSers want to take your site offline. Some website running on a VPS on a small hosting company likely won't be able to have the resources to keep their site running... which in my opinion is fine. If people want to shout you down in public because they don't want others to hear what you have to say, well then find somewhere else to express your views.