Before I found that there was a lot more money and a lost less hours and stress doing consulting than being a cubicle drone, I worked for a large hosting company.

Handling a DDOS attack is a piece of cake. We handled a few a week and this was in the early 2000s. We would watch the router traffic graphs and see a spike that might be eating 5% or 10% of our capacity and just grin. All you need is money. Your ISP needs giant pipes, spare server capacity distributed around the world and sharp network guys, and for the right price, they'll simply make the problem go away for you.

However the cost of doing this means that if $1500 to Rackspace sounds like a lot of money, you're not in this league.

If you're at the "less than $200/month" level for hosting, your best course of action is to not piss people off, and if you're attacked just hope you can wait it out.

The "up side" of having a small site with cheap hosting is that it probably won't actually do much damage to your business if it's down for a few days.

> I'm 43 and I work in the way he describes. I've never had more freedom, more time, or more money.

Absolutely! Start your own business and whore yourself out to the companies that were dumb enough to fire all their really talented guys.

I've never been happier. I wake up every morning at the crack of "whenever the hell I feel like it", make breakfast, take the dog out for a walk, then drop in on some clients.

While the money has never been better, the freedom and peace of mind is infinitely more valuable.

I have no CS degree. I have no degree of any kind and have been working in IT for 25+ years. I was snatched out of college before I had the chance to finish my P/E requirement. Apparently knowing how to run around a track or dribble a basketball was important somehow. In any case, I never went back and never finished.

In any case, once you have some successes under your belt, nobody gives a crap where (or if) you graduated.

While there's nothing wrong with a degree, it really doesn't certify that you have any special knowledge or level of expertise, it certifies that you're a good drone and can put up with huge quantities of pointless tasks and bullshit assignments, which makes you perfect for the corporate workforce or government.

I'm sure any number of military and intelligence agencies would be thrilled to give them a pile of money and all the cool toys they could handle.

Oddly enough, the Chinese government isn't stupid and takes a very long-term view of things.

This could be exactly what they're planning and want this to happen so they can have the benefits and freedom due to the "changing times" without having to embarrass themselves by back-peddling with their current policy. It also lets them selectively enforce "who has freedom" by allowing the access policy to the area be "leaky".

If you don't control everything on the box, you can't ensure security.

Regardless of what they claim or what they do, you're essentially sharing the box with hundreds or thousands of other users who potentially have access to run whatever they feel like.

I would suggest a Virtual Private Server on Linode. Your server is yours and security will live or die by how you configure it.

When most of the long haul and medium haul fiber was laid, they didn't just bury what they needed, they buried a bunch of it. However most was never connected to equipment (lit up).

This dark fiber is still sitting in trenches and conduits (many were taxpayer funded) running along a huge number of US superhighways, and has not seen a single byte of data.

This is mostly because having additional capacity would remove the artifical limits, increase the supply and cause prices for internet access to drop.

While some companies have problems with "the last mile" (to the home), companies that ran fiber to the home like Verizon, are still attempting to limit bandwidth and create artifical shortages.