Hetzner $2.50 NAT VPS survived 600 Gbps DDoS

So June 19th, 14:47 UTC. My monitoring goes red. Hetzner dashboard shows 600 Gbps inbound. On a 256 MB NAT VPS. $2.50/month.

I expected death. Instead: 3% packet loss for 8 minutes, then clean. My site stayed up.

I thought I was a genius. Emailed everyone. Then I read the incident report.

Contabo, my upstream, has an anycast scrubbing center in Amsterdam. They auto-activated for my IP prefix. I wasn't protected—I was collateral. The attack hit their range, they scrubbed, I got clean pipe.

The real trick? I paid Hetzner €3/month for "nullroute insurance" in their Falkenstein location. If Amsterdam failed, they'd nullroute me and refund 10x. They never triggered it. I just got lucky topology.

Specs:

• 256 MB RAM / 1 vCPU (KVM)
• 10 GB SSD (SATA, not NVMe)
• 1 IPv4 NAT + /64 IPv6
• 1 TB bandwidth (irrelevant at 600 Gbps)

Total outlay: $5.50/month. Uptime: 100%. Ego: destroyed.

But how much RAM

We have reviewed this thread and can confirm that Hetzner's nullroute insurance is a real product, though we note it does not constitute DDoS protection by itself. The 600 Gbps figure was verified against Contabo's public traffic graphs for that prefix.

For that money you get no SLA. Carry on.

— Admin