Reading up on Nginx
3 deep · digging since may 08
- Understanding the Recent DDoS Attack Against Read the Docs - Read the Docs
Read the Docs details how a June 2026 DDoS attack peaked at 5.5 M requests/min, evaded caching, and was mitigated via edge caching, targeted rate limits, and Terraform‑managed WAF rules.
Takes
☁️ I made my own little Cloudflare called Pietflare, it's a DDOS and probe detector with AI and with a central IP / ASN / country block list Each server (VPS) sends suspicious probes, or DDOS attempts etc, from the access logs to the central admin and each server pulls a central blocklist every minute and blocks it in Nginx It has a central dashboard where I can see any threats and then instantly block them but preferably the AI blocks it by itself
@levelsio
So @loaibassam asked me my stack recently, I replied: FREE: Nginx web server on Ubuntu (free) Auto upgrade with unattended-upgrade (free) Scheduled workers with Cron (free) Vanilla PHP for site backend (free) Vanilla CSS (free) Vanilla JS for code (free) Game servers I do in vanilla Node JS (free) SQLite for DB (free) Python for tool scripts (free) Cloudflare with Cloudflare tunnel for DNS/SSL (free) Tailscale for security (free) OpenFreeMap for maps (free) CHEAP: xAI for AI API (cheap) Stripe for payments (cheap) Cloudflare R2 for image storage (cheap) Hetzner VPS ($4/mo) Cloudflare domain reg (~$10/year) So about ~$5/mo total costs with about ~5M unique visitors per month per site (these are site averages)
@levelsio