I've got bot detection setup in Nginx on my VPS which used to return 444 (Nginx for "close the connection and waste no more resources processing it), but I recently started piping that traffic to Nepenthes to return gibberish data for them to train on.

I documented a rough guide in the comment here. Of relevance to you are the two .conf files at the bottom. In the deny-disallowed.conf, change the line for return 301 ... to return 444

I also utilize firewall and fail2ban in the VPS to block bad actors, overly-aggressive scrapers, password brute forces, etc and the link between the VPS and my homelab equipment never sees that traffic.

In the case of a DDoS, I've done the following:

• Enable aggressive rate limits in Nginx (it may be slow for everyone but it's still up)
• Just stop either Wireguard or Nginx on the VPS until the storm blows over. (Crude but useful to avoid any bandwidth overages if you're charged for inbound traffic).

Granted, I'm not running anything mission-critical, just some services for friends and family, so I can deal with a little downtime.