Question
Does increasing droplet size increase instantaneous throughput?
Of all the articles and forum posts I’ve read, Digital Ocean seems very hand-wavy about their droplet networking capabilities. To clarify, I’m not talking about the “monthly bandwidth allowance,” I’m talking about download/upload speeds and total network throughput of a droplet.
Explanation
I’m running a pfSense router as a $5/month droplet. I’m a university student, but I have my own server that I want to run services on. Since I’m behind their firewall, I can’t do this directly, so I run a pfSense site-to-site VPN into the DO cloud to give my local server running in my dorm a “public IP” that I can port forward with.
But my roommate and I are about to announce a game server, giving the IP of the Digital Ocean droplet/router as the connect address. Seeing as how I’m currently at one of the few universities in the US that offer the cybersecurity major, I’m definitely expecting some attacks on my systems and network.
Obviously I’ve locked everything down from a security standpoint, but I’ve hit a roadblock in terms of protecting from brute-force DDoS attacks, since Digital Ocean doesn’t natively provide protection.
Question
I can’t seem to find a straight answer to my question: can I get more throughput (thus being able to operate under higher-bandwidth DDoS attacks) by upgrading to a higher tier droplet, or do they only provide better system specs?
I’m not looking to protect against serious multi-gigabit attacks; I know that I’m kinda screwed there. I’m simply looking to mitigate some dolt with a Raspberry Pi and a university-grade internet connection from taking out my entire network infrastructure.
Side note
It’s not that difficult to run a DoS/DDoS against a $5 droplet. A simple hping3 script running on a handful of computers can easily saturate its bandwidth and knock out service. During a stress test, my droplet wasn’t able to handle any more than 235 Mb/s inbound, which is relatively high compared to many consumer-grade connections, but that’s an upload speed that you could easily find at our local library and run on a single laptop with a gigabit card.
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