[sph]

How many small websites served by Cloudflare risk being DDOS'd? How many small website owners would incur serious loss of livelihood if they are DDOS'd for a few days? Is DDOS risk so important that the web needs a protection racket?

> If small websites can just be DDOS'd out of existence

DDOS doesn't destroy websites. It just makes them unreachable until the disgruntled person decides it's been running long enough.

Please stop exaggerating a very real problem only a few entities on the web have; what you are perpetuating is FUD, which enables companies like Cloudflare to kill the web.

> The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket

How do you not even see the irony of this?

[ivanmontillam]

> DDOS doesn't destroy websites. It just makes them unreachable until the disgruntled person decides it's been running long enough.

You can be absolutely destroyed if your hosting provider later hits you as a Website Owner with an excess traffic bill.

[pocksuppet]

Fire your provider then. They're probably not paying for inbound traffic (most orgs are billed on the dominant traffic direction, so inbound for eyeballs and outbound for hosting), so it's pure extortion on their part.

[lstodd]

While it is entirely possible to enter such a contract with a provider, it is your fault in the end. Don't maybe enter them?

[dylan604]

> Please stop exaggerating a very real problem only a few entities on the web have; what you are perpetuating is FUD, which enables companies like Cloudflare to kill the web.

I'm not exaggerating, I'm just playing what if. That's a game where you think of random things that could go wrong, and then deciding if it is worth the expense. Just because maybe you can't think of things of varying plausibility does not make me exaggerating. We already see ransomware working from the hacker's perspective. There's no reason to think that greed will not come into play. If I can think of it, there's no reason to think that hackers are not also considering various ways to expand on ransomware as a service

>> The next thing you'll hear about is a monthly service fee to the hackers as a protection racket

> How do you not even see the irony of this?

How do you not? If every hacking group can come along and extort any site they choose to pay them a protection fee, there's no way websites will accept any of this. Compare that to paying a single legit service protecting against all of those hacking groups. Can't imagine why people would be willing to do that.

[therein]

This is the same mindset that wants to make it illegal to sell kitchen knives with sharp tips.

[dylan604]

How do you come to that conclusion? It's so far off of what I said that you've got some splainin' to do