Project #30: Added Cloudflare protection to JordanIsLame and GurenCodes websites, and learned about Google Captcha, and how to make a captcha yourself.

Estimated date of creation: May 18th, 2025

Status: Online 🟢

As I’ve said before, I’m a bit paranoid about being DDOSed. When I first set up my server for these two websites, I noticed in my firewall logs that bots crawl the internet and send SSH requests to people’s servers, like, every 5 seconds. So there are constantly people trying to SSH into your server at any given moment. These are likely created by hackers, that could find something useful if they invade your databases, for instance, like user passwords or credit card numbers. I already have multiple layers of security on my servers to prevent SSH access, database access, root access, etc. Seriously, it was a sobering moment, noticing that people were trying to log into my Linux user, every 2 seconds.

In order to prevent data transfer fees, I decided to instantiate Cloudflare protection. Cloudflare can use reverse proxies and split traffic from hammering in a precise manner. It can kind of diffuse it like light through a screen so that your IP isn’t being hammered so intensely at once. I’ve noticed that many website use Cloudflare, including 4chan. A site like that gets attacked a lot, surely, by botnets, and I also read a story recently of Simmer.IO, where a DDOS cost him $100,000 and ripped apart his website. So I’m adding Cloudflare as some botnet protection.

I also did some experiments with Google Recaptcha, which I’ll use for forms in the future to prevent spam, etc. I’ll try to add a page showing what I mean soon, including a Captcha you can fill if you want to help Google’s machine learning.