> I found CF is a bit too aggressive with anti-DDOS measures
As someone who does a lot of browsing with unpopular web browsers, Cloudflare is basically a way to ensure that it is a coin toss as to whether or not I will see your site; it is not the worst CDN/DoS protection racket service out there though. I would like to see how much legitimate traffic Cloudflare or the others block, and how much website operators are spending on that "service."
This is something that is configurable though. If you leave your Firewall security mode to default, then yes it will block IPs with bad rep.
If I don't care about anti-ddos, I just set the Firewall security to Low, and create a Firewall rule to allow everything from 0.0.0.0/0, simple as that.
Good to know that about Cloudflare. Believe it or not, there is at least one DoS protection provider/Web Application Firewall service/whatever you want to call it, that seems to default to asking you to solve captchas to view web pages.
Is there a good alternative, particularly one that does not impose their own moderation/censorship regime? After Cloudflare decided to abandon content neutrality (https://reclaimthenet.org/cloudflare-suspends-8chan/) I really don’t want anything to do with them.
Or are there reasonable software or hardware options to protect one’s own servers directly without relying on a third party service?
As someone who does a lot of browsing with unpopular web browsers, Cloudflare is basically a way to ensure that it is a coin toss as to whether or not I will see your site; it is not the worst CDN/DoS protection racket service out there though. I would like to see how much legitimate traffic Cloudflare or the others block, and how much website operators are spending on that "service."