Linux VPS as a firewall and load balancer

dcb1101 · Jun 18, 2015

I'd like to have a firewall and load balancer but they expensive. Can I get a third VPS and use it as a firewall and load balancer? I know it is possible but what are pros/cons?

jordantyj · Jun 18, 2015

I installed a firewall on my VPS but I disabled it because I found that my website loads slowly when having a firewall.

why happened that?

RDO Servers · Jun 18, 2015

You absolutely can use a linux server as a load balancer and a firewall.

For firewall, use iptables.
For load balancing use nginx or HAProxy

The main benefit in using a VPS or a server instead of a dedicated firewall/LB is the price. A Good Cisco firewall and LoadMaster LB will set you back thousands of dollars to purchase or a couple hundred dollars a month to lease.

Now for the downfalls:
You can run your firewall on your one VPS. The whole reason to have a dedicated firewall is to offload the work to a separate machine, rather then letting the extra tasks consuming resources on your primary machine. You can setup a VPS as a firewall to handle this for you,. but consider the resources you have on the VPS. If it is low on resources, and maxing out, it will certainly slow things down and potentially crash under a higher load.

The same can apply to load balancing. If you are running a VPS as a Firewall and LB, what kind of load does this create? Also, make sure your firewall, LB, and web server VPS's are on different physical machines. If you have both VPS's on the same physical server, the load balancer is moot since it won't have anything to redirect traffic to if the server goes down.

RDO Servers · Jun 18, 2015

I am not familiar with Stamius specifically, but there are quite a few cloud based DDoS protection services out there. Most of them do not publicise their exact network limits, but will have plans that protect against different levels of attack.

There are 2 types of DDoS protection:
Hardware based. Dedicated hardware and specific software to analyze and filter attack traffic. It lets the good traffic through, and blocks the bad traffic. This can still eat up your bandwidth allocations and is limited to the port speed you are on.

Cloud based. This uses a network of geographically diverse servers that all of your traffic is routed through. Either by your DNS or a BGP tunnel. Cloud services are able to filter a much larger attack because it can spread the load across multiple servers. Think 400Gbps on 1 server, or 1Gbps on 400 servers.

If you are looking for budget DDoS protection, check out Cloudflare. I wouldn't consider them the best, but it is a good option and you can even start with a free account. We have them integrated into our control panel to make it easier for customers to setup their hosting to use Cloudflare DNS and DDoS protection.

Start with a free Cloudflare and play around with their settings and protection limits. It's not fool proof (nothing is!), but I have seen some good results.

Linux VPS as a firewall and load balancer

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