I have Pangolin set up as a reverse proxy in my VPS and Cloudflare as a DNS provider with its free tier.
I want to migrate out of Cloudflare for my setup, however I lack the requisite network knowledge to safely transition my VPS and domain to better alternatives and don’t know where to start its research from.
There are two features I intend my setup to have after the transition:
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DDoS protection: I was considering using Crowdsec as there is a guide to incorporate it into Pangolin, but I do not know if it will be sufficient or not. I saw a post earlier listing some alternative DDoS protection solutions, but I am wary of their limited free tier options compared to that of Cloudflare and I don’t wish to pay for them as my homelab is mostly going to be used by me and a handful of friends.
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Wildcard Certificate Generation: My domain provider has a poor DNS service and is not listed under LEGO’s supporter DNS providers for enabling wildcard certificate generation and the Cloudflare one does not seem to work for some reason. I don’t know of any other compatible DNS provider I could shift to unless it is provided within the other DDoS protection services as mentioned above.
Again, I don’t have much knowledge in this field but I’m willing to learn and make an informed decision. Please let me know any suitable alternatives for the above, the pros and cons for the migrations, or some guide on performing such transition from Cloudflare as you seem fit.
Do you really need that DDoS protection? I have been having my own webserver for decades now hosting public sites and I have only once been in the position that my server was not reachable because of a DDoS attack. And even then the attack was not targeted at my server but at my hosting provider at that time. Everything else was handled by fail2ban easily…
For the DNS provider I recommend https://desec.io/. It’s a nonprofit running worldwide DNS servers, supports DNSSEC, and has a plugin for Lego. If your registrar supports DNSSEC as well, I’d recommend enabling it to protect from DNS forgery.
For the DDoS protection I don’t have a recommendation as they’re all “just another SaaS”, but maybe you could limit many more selfhosted things behind auth as to not expose more surface to potential scrapers.
Crowdsec does not provide DDOS protection in the same manner as Cloudflare. You can use crowdsec to block the traffic at your server, but it has already reached your server, and will be using up your ingress bandwidth regardless. So if you were DDOS’d, your site will go down.
Cloudflare prevents the traffic ever reaching your server, while allowing the legitimate traffic through. They block it on their servers, which have much higher bandwidth than any VPS provider has.
Google Cloud Armor, AWS Shield, Fastly, Akamai, Incapsula, Freenom World, DDoS-GUARD, Netlify, all offer some level of DDoS and plans vary widely. Cloudflare’s Tunnels/Zero Trust free tier is quite generous. I realize some selfhosters have an aversion to Cloudflare, but Cloudflare is very good at what they do. There are VPS hosts that do offer DDoS protection like DigitalOcean, Vultr, Linode, A2 Hosting, Hostinger, OVH, however, it’s usually just basic DDoS protection. Maybe check with your host to see what they offer.
Most edge DDoS protection of any merit is going to be the big guys. You could lock down your VPS to only you and your handful of friends, but unfortunately, in the event of a DDoS attack, your server will be bearing the brunt of the attack. Is your VPS server of a nature that would elicit repeated DDoS attacks? I’ll have to say, anecdotally, that I’ve never experienced one, but that is no guarantee that you wouldn’t either.
There is no competition for ddos protection unless you enter into an arrangement with akamai or fastly, which won’t happen unless you have the traffic and the $$$ to support it.
Cloudflare can soak up volumetric traffic at scale. Crowdsec cannot do this, because the “crowd” par of crowdsec is rulesets, you are still doing all the heavy lifting with your own infra.
