That’s the POV when the company leadership doesn’t understand software development and promotes based on quick wins.

Companies that allows and even encourage bus factors of one devs like John will always have these issues.

and even dating apps

Are 15 year olds on dating apps?! How is that legal now?

Nice try Universal Studios!

Do you have access to Raspberry Pi clones like Orange Pis etc? They’re often cheaper and you can order them straight from China.

It’s static between changes

I haven’t checked the ToS in a while but last I checked it was 50mb upload limit for the free tier and a loosely policed no video streaming. And they don’t shut you down if you send files larger than 50mb, the upload just fails. I served over 8 million requests through the free tier last month.

Use Cloudflare’s free tier tunnel

What are you hosting and who are your users? Do you receive any legitimate traffic from AWS or other cloud provider IP addresses? There will always be edge cases like people hosting VPN exit nodes on a VPS etc, but if its a tiny portion of your legitimate traffic I would consider blocking all incoming traffic from cloud providers and then whitelisting any that make sense like search engine crawlers if necessary.

OP can use a Cloudflare tunnel which would take care of caching and prevent any accidental DDoS attacks.