Cloudflare doesn’t help your DDOS

Ever since CloudFlare helped out Spamhaus with their big deal big DNS reflection DDOS attack, conventional wisdom has said that if you are faced with a DDOS attack, you should give CloudFlare a shot. By all means, give it a try: they have a compelling free offer that seems to be just the thing you need.

Here is what will happen:

  • You switch your DNS to cloudflare
  • You get your site up again
  • You receive a DDOS attack
  • You survive said DDOS attack
  • You think cloudflare is cool
  • You tell all your friends
  • You get a new and rewewed DDOS attack
  • You get a mail like below from cloudflare saying, basically, sorry dude, you’re toast.
  • You can now choose to pay $200 USD per month, or accept that your site is just sometimes going to be down.

The moral of the story is: you’re not spamhaus.  To be fair, cloudflare do say, somewhere in their blog or site that they’re not a DDOS solution.

From: CloudFlare <no-reply@cloudflare.com>
Subject: victim.co.za has been temporarily removed from CloudFlare
Date: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 02:11:21 +0000

CloudFlare has temporarily deactivated your website victim.co.za.

Your visitors will be directed to your origin server, where your website is hosted, instead of first passing through CloudFlare’s performance and security service. We’ll resume routing traffic through CloudFlare once the issue has been resolved. We review deactivated websites every 5 to 7 business days. To check your status, please log into: www.cloudflare.com/my-websites

COMMON QUESTIONS

WHY WAS MY SITE TEMPORARILY DEACTIVATED?
CloudFlare runs a globally distributed network serving millions of websites. Sometimes a large DDOS attack to one of our Free or Pro customers may degrade network performance. In these cases, we may temporarily remove the website under attack to avoid network degradation.

I AM ON THE FREE OR PRO PLAN. WILL UPGRADING TO BUSINESS HELP?
Yes. CloudFlare's advanced DDOS protection is included in the Business and Enterprise plans. If you upgrade to the Business plan, your website will be activated again.

HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE TO REACTIVATE MY SITE IF I DON’T UPGRADE?
We review deactivated websites every 5 to 7 business days.

IF I DELETE MY SITE AND RE-ADD IT, WILL THE TEMPORARY HOLD DISAPPEAR?
No. Any temporary holds are attached to the domain so deleting and re-adding the website will not change its status.

Replies to this email are not monitored or answered. For FAQs or to reach our help desk, please visit: www.cloudflare.com/support

Thank you for using CloudFlare.

The CloudFlare Team

***This is an automatic notification for victim.co.za
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