Comment by anoonmoose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anoonmoose | Hacker News Reader

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A somewhat related aside/question for the crowd- I've been hosting my own website for a little while with no issues, but I also don't really have any media stuff up on there. I added a wiki recently and have really enjoyed working on it. But, right now, that also has no media stuff on it, and I think I would like it to, but I also feel like this is one of those "haha you thought this would be easy? fuck you' things.

I'm not worried about it from a normal usage standpoint. The website isn't interactive, I plan on being the only person with edit privileges on the wiki, for example. But I feel like based on things I've read, mostly on HN over the years, that this is opening a...different sort of box of worms than I already have open. Easier DDOS? Abuse of my image hosting, killing my monthly bandwidth allotment? I really don't want to have to set up a CDN just to host a wiki that is averaging less than one not-me viewer per month...

Am I paranoid, or just uninformed?

It depends on your hosting situation, but unless you're using a hosting plan with bandwidth allotments from like 1993, you definitely don't need to worry about that. My host gives me like 2TB of bandwidth per month for $10/mo, and even with an article with several images hitting the front-page of HN for a full day, I think I used less than 1/3 of that allotment.

And unless you're doing something really... bizarre... no one is going to spend their resources to DDoS your personal blog :)

What's your barometer for "bizzare" though?

The sad reality is that anyone running a website on the Internet these days is target for a DDoS, you only have to piss off the wrong somebody with 5 cents of sense and $50 of Bitcoin. Your personal website about birds you saw could get DDoSed by your neighbor who thinks you're lying about seeing more birds than him. To be clear, most sites will be unmolested and if it's a small personal site, just taking it down until the attacker gets bored is certainly one option. But if it's something business related you don't really have that option.

To be blunt, I don't think any of that is very likely.

I wouldn't have either. Then, a week ago, a newly created Twitter account started following me, using my wife's first name and part of our address as the display name, and using a picture of our house as the profile picture. Look, I know that tweeting under my real name and owning a house in the US means that the amount of effort required to actually find all that stuff is pretty minimal...I didn't do anything much more bizarre than complain about Elon turning Twitter to shit, and it's a pretty good guess that that's what they were upset about since the account was only following me and Elon.

People be wilding out there man.

One way to reduce harm from DDOS is to host the content with decentralized protocol e.g. ipfs and link the images or even the entire website through public gateway.

That's not ideal as it just shifts the problem to the gateway. Maybe NDN (named data network) could help if more routers support that.

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