Affordable DDoS protection

I had to laugh when I saw a newsletter titled Advanced, affordable DDoS protection in my inbox from Neustar.

I think it was only recently Neustar actually publicly advertised their basic package fees. Usually Neustar has the business model of evaluating how much you think DNS is worth and charging you as much as possible for it.

Lets assume you're on the basic DNS package of a million queries a month.

Now if you go over a million queries a month, you get charged. They don't tell you how much on their Web page, but I know from being on a customer site who was "attacked" (for the first time, for no motive what-so-ever), and who went millions over that quota were charged something like 10k USD. Which is frankly madness.

I called Neustar on behalf of the client asking:

• Why didn't you inform the customer that they were being attacked?
• Why can't you (Neustar) deal with it?
• Why didn't you have some sort of cap so the customer doesn't get charged, lets say 10000 USD unexpectedly?

On the day Neustar said there wasn't much they could do, because we weren't on the more expensive "DNS DDOS protection" plan. Cue frantic calls to the "account manager" and "high level" negotiations.

On the client side, thinking of what to do... we removed the DNS record (this record was for a domain the client didn't even use!!) and according to Neustar we created even more problems for a reason I wish I knew.

What a joke. This is DNS folks. It's not that hard!!

I would like to think since they are Neustar UltraDNS, they are probably more prone to DDOS attacks then any other provider. Hence I really can't recommend Neustar UltraDNS. Avoid.