Is there any cheap way to run personal websites without getting cooked by bots these days, degrading the performance? A $5/month VPS won't cut it anymore.

"A $5/month VPS won't cut it anymore."

Are you speaking from experience, or inferring from articles like this?

I serve a static site on the lowest Linode $5/month VPS and it is grotesquely overprovisioned for that use case. It is not the case that every site is getting slammed every second by hundreds of requests per second.

Now, if you have some sort of dynamically-computed website that is generated by a slow scripting language that is poorly optimized and hits the database too many times for a single page, yeah, it doesn't take many RPS to take you out. But that isn't the only option; it's the slowest of the slow options. Realistic, there are plenty of sites that match that description, but I concatenated that many clauses on purpose. Drop any one of them and your personal site will be fine.

Static files on literally any hardware from the last 15 years on modern server software simply won't get cooked by bots. The network switch will bottleneck you before the server will. Your ephemeral port range will run out before the server will.

Cloudflare offers a free plan that's fantastic. The free plan gives you effectively unlimited DNS/CDN traffic for a normal site, while the main practical cap is 100,000 Worker invocations per day, with 10 ms CPU per Worker request and a 100 MB request body limit. (If that means anything to you).

The next tier up from free is $25/month or $240 per year.

https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/ https://www.cloudflare.com/plans/free/

I run my personal website (and a bunch of other websites and services) off a somewhat more expensive but still reasonable VPS (I think 20€ at TransIP - it's so little that I forgot). Load is basically nil most of the time anyway. I think the bot problem is not so bad for personal websites.

Yeah, you just make sure your site is fast enough to handle more than 1 RPS.

But if you want them to actually stop, you can also just serve a little JavaScript page that sets a cookie and refreshes, to anyone who hasn't set the cookie. The DDOS attacker doesn't run JavaScript.

GitHub Pages, GitLab Pages, and Cloudflare Pages are all free. If you have a static site, you don't need to worry about lock-in, since your files are easily portable to a different provider.

I made this tool to try and make it easier for beginners to get something up on the public web for free: https://weejur.com

I host a couple WordPress blogs on Lithium Hosting. It's like $5/mo, fixed cost, and I've never had any issues. If I somehow hit a transfer usage cap, they would just shut my site down until the next month, but I've never had that happen.

All my personal websites are on a single $5/mo OVH VPS and it works perfectly fine.

A $5/month VPS should cut it completely fine unless you're doing something very complicated.

My site's built in Go on a reasonably priced VPS and holds up well. I do geoblock traffic from China and a few other countries as well as IP ranges maintained by Spamhaus.

Static site. If you do go for a WCM of some sort you should make sure that if it has a calendar view of some sort it isn't unbounded but that it only goes as far back as your first post, and only goes as far forward as your latest. That's one of the many ways the poorly-implemented AI systems get stuck.

I have a low cost VPS (actually two in two different pre-AI datacenters) and it runs fine. I use nginx to serve the web pages, and the content is about 99% static content.

The vBulletin and PHPbb style forums have issues with slowdown (I haven’t had a forum since 2015; even back then those forums were overrun with spambots), but static content on a nginx site can be served lightning fast.

If you have a static site, GitHub pages is free

A $5/month VPS is fine for mostly static content. I’ve got a site that has been pulling millions of viewers and sits at the top of google for its niche for a decade. It is now hammered with bot traffic constantly. But everything is cached so it’s fine.

All of my boxes are cheap VPS. Highly recommend people throw Cloudflare in front of their stuff. I switched all of my load balancers over to there and all of that bot crap went away. That combined with a proper UFW setup keeps the weather clear for me.

I have a very low traffic blog and I just use the nearlyfreespeech to host it. So far it’s been less than $1

I'm on a $4/mo droplet on Digital Ocean and my static site has been just fine. I'm using Caddy and it seems to handle the load like a champ. My site is very lightweight though, so ymmv.

Cloudfare has a very generous plan usually for hobby projects. The article did mention that cloudfare did not work for them, but they have recently introduced few features to block AI crawling as well.

A lot of my sites are on $5 vps and run very well.

Sef-host with tailscale or something similar

My sites run on cloudflare workers and static pages for free

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