How do I protect my Ubuntu server from DDOS?

Question

I am currently buying old PCs that work properly and turning them into Ubuntu (16.04) servers. they work really good, but I was wondering how to set up DDOS protection for them.

Answer 1

DDoS is a very tricky attack to prepare for and or withstand. If your website isn't gonna scale that much, I doubt anyone/anyteam will be interested in investing in the effort and time attacking your platform.

However if your site is gonna grow to the level bringing it down might be fun for some bad person or body, you might wanna take these suggestions:

1. Use a third-party platform: A very common one is CloudFlare, but they're many other options out there. Ride with the one you love and suits your needs best.

2. Choose a VPS provider with DDoS mitigation strategies in place. DigitalOcean is one of them.

3. If you run your own server farms or datacenters, you might wanna invest in hardwares designed to process traffic on the fly to sideline the bad ones. Softwares can do it, however hardwares designed for the task happen to be faster. Easier said than done, but can significantly reduce the hit in times of attack.

4. If you ever grow to be big as Google, you might not worry about DDoS that much, as your infrastructure will be probably enough to swallow the total internet traffic a few folds over.

Answer 2

I'd suggest you to buy the servers from verified VPS sellers as you'd be able to expand your storage space and scale them as per your need. Amazon is one such option.

Just in case if you still want to use your old PCs as your server then putting up a firewall is your best option. But that won't guarantee a 100% protection as the security depends on a large number of factors including, but not limited to, your bandwidth, vulnerabilities in the software you used to host the website, coding your website, and a lot of other stuffs.