Recently, several friends doing overseas chess and cards complained to me that the server was hit by DDoS every day to the point that they couldn't take care of themselves, and the overseas players were so stuck that they directly cursed their mothers. A buddy is even worse, just launched a new game in Southeast Asia, the same day was paralyzed, the loss of direct six-figure start. These days do chess, no reliable high defense CDN pocket, simply running naked ah.
Overseas node selection is actually a technical job, never just find a CDN vendor can be solved. I found that many vendors claimed “global coverage”, the results of Southeast Asia nodes are all detoured from Hong Kong, Europe and the United States nodes do not move to jump the North American backbone network. Player latency does not move 300ms +, the card can not be played, but also play a hammer? More pitiful is that some CDN “high defense” is a setup, encountering real attacks directly back to the source, which is equal to the source IP exposed to the attacker.
Let's start with Southeast Asia. Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, these places, the local operators are as complex as a discus hole, if the CDN vendors do not have a local POP point, latency minutes to teach you to do people. Last year, I tested a CDN called “Southeast Asia Optimization”, the actual route tracking found that the packet actually detoured from Singapore to Japan and then back to Thailand, the delay directly soared to 220ms. player feedback? Directly a “garbage game” uninstalled.
Europe and the United States are even more hard-hit areas. In order to save costs, some manufacturers only throw two nodes in Frankfurt and Silicon Valley, and then dare to say “cover Europe and the United States”. Even Frankfurt's latency can reach 80ms for Eastern European players, not to mention Spain and Italy. Really want to cover Europe and the United States, at least in Eastern Europe (such as Warsaw), Western Europe (Amsterdam), the United States West (Los Angeles), the United States East (New York) deployment of four or five core nodes, coupled with edge nodes for scheduling.
CC attacks and UDP floods are the norm, and some attacks can last for weeks. I have seen the most ruthless time, a chess platform was hit 700Gbps mixed attack, ordinary cloud protection directly kneel. Later on, it switched to a vendor specializing in high defense for chess, and relied on fingerprint identification and behavioral analysis to carry it hard.
Don't believe the false advertising of “unlimited protection”. The real protection ability depends on the capacity of the cleaning center and scheduling strategy. For example, CDN5, their cleaning centers in Singapore and Los Angeles are measured to be able to carry 1.2Tbps of traffic, and there are fingerprint identification libraries specifically for chess protocols. The last time to help customers migrate to the past, the attack traffic from 300G soared to 800G did not penetrate.
Configuration optimization is the real place to see the power. A lot of operations and maintenance only know how to set CDN, not even adjust the caching strategy:
Recently tested CDN07's performance in Southeast Asia is surprising. In Indonesia and the Philippines, they are directly connected with the local operator Peer, the latency of Jakarta node is as low as 38ms, and Manila node is only 42ms. what's more critical is that their Anycast network can switch routes in seconds in case of an attack, and the players can't sense it at all. One customer's churn rate dropped by 17% after the migration.
08Host's European and American routes are worth mentioning separately. They used Turfiberia's local operator in Eastern Europe (I guess not many people have heard of this name), but the latency of the Warsaw node to Moscow is as low as 55ms. the US West node is connected to the HE and Cogent double line, the evening peak are not bombed. However, it is important to note that their protection strategy needs to be manually tuned, the default configuration can not resist the CC attacks specific to Chess.
Price gouging is the industry norm. Some vendors look at the unit price is cheap, but additional charges for traffic cleaning fees, HTTPS request fees, and even API call fees. Calculated per Gbps protection cost can be more than three times the difference. It is best to look for the use of integrated billing like CDN5, protection + traffic packaged price, measured monthly savings of 30% cost.
Finally said a tearful lesson: always let the CDN vendor to hide the source IP! Some small factories to save trouble to let customers point A record high defense IP, the source server is still exposed in the public network. I've seen the most outrageous, the attacker directly bypassed the CDN to hit the source station hanging. The correct approach is to allow vendors to provide exclusive IP segments, the source station only allows these IP segments back to the source:
If you don't know how to configure a firewall, you should look for a hosted service from the vendor. CDN07 provides a full set of configurations, and the technicians will help you adjust the firewall rules directly and remotely. Although it costs a little more money, but worry ah, better than being paralyzed by the loss of a day strong.
Doing overseas chess now is like dancing in a minefield, defending against both hackers and peers. Last time, there was a customer who encountered a perverted competitor, specializing in launching slow attacks during the event, keeping each connection for several hours but not sending packets, deliberately consuming the number of server connections. Later, 08Host's protocol stack analysis function was used to identify this attack disguised as a normal connection.
Newbies are most likely to plant on SSL configuration. Remember to turn on TLS 1.3 for the whole site, and pay particular attention to the compatibility of the certificate chain for chess apps. Once the customer used the certificate middleware is missing, resulting in Indonesia some old cell phone system can not handshake, white loss of a large number of users. Now I am forced to use SSL Labs to test the rating to A+:
Never save money on monitoring alerts. We recommend using Prometheus+Grafana to do multi-dimensional monitoring, focusing on monitoring TCP retransmission rate and first packet time. There was a time when Tokyo node's network fluctuated, and the first packet time increased from 80ms to 200ms in time to detect the failure. If you wait for players to complain and then deal with it, the food will be cold.
To be honest, this line of water is too deep, many manufacturers of the “number of nodes” are false labeling. The real reliable or their own measurement:
After the test you will know which vendors are bragging. The last test of a claimed “30 nodes in Southeast Asia”, the actual can be used on 7, the other all virtual nodes or NAT forwarding.
If the budget is sufficient, it is recommended to use a multi-cloud program. CDN5 focuses on Asian routes, 08Host covers Europe and the United States, CDN07 for backup protection. Although the cost is high, but really stable, a well-known chess platform with this set of architecture to carry the last November wave of 900G big attack.
Finally said a solid: do not be greedy and cheap with those unknown small factory. A customer to save 20% costs to choose a new vendor, the results were pierced even customer service phone can not be reached. Later realized that the entire technical team of three people, the attack came directly to pull out the network line. Chess in this line, stability is 10,000 times more important than saving money.
In short, the choice of overseas high defense CDN is like matching equipment, there is no best only the most suitable. The key is to look at the actual business distribution and attack characteristics. It is recommended to take a test account to run a week to monitor the data, and then combined with the cost of making decisions. After all, players will not give you a second chance - lag three times directly uninstalled, is so realistic.
