VPNs and Hosting: The Pros, Cons, and Pitfalls.
VPNs and Hosting: The Pros, Cons, and Pitfalls.
We often hear positive things about hosting options, VPNs, and VPN-hosting for privacy and bypassing restrictions. Yet the reality is more complex. I run a few services on my personal machine with a fixed IPv4 address and sufficient upload speed. It faces attacks from around the globe. To defend myself, I use Linux firewalls (iptables/ipset plus drop rules). Traffic from CDN77, M247, and other providers comes in regularly. The challenge lies in handling different mailers: Skype uses Microsoft IPs, some websites rely on Amazon or Google cloud, and others require unblocking. I even needed to clear restrictions for OVH because its mailer depends on it. Recently, I encountered new attempts from OVH IPs. I’m unsure how to proceed without blocking entire ranges, which would disrupt essential services, nor without risking endless log file growth.
P.S. All firewall logs and recent hits are shared at https://github.com/Commaster/IP-wall. Previously, sending abuse reports via the provided email in whois reports didn’t produce any results.
It appears there is no effective way to address this problem, not even among those who advocate for VPNs or hosting solutions. I’ll start blocking entire IP ranges of these services and criticize anyone using them.
Because of the constant flow of new attack attempts from unfamiliar IP addresses and no progress even after sending responses, I chose to stop my work. It had reached at least a thousand real users globally. It seems some organizations simply ignore repeated misuse of their systems for harmful purposes.