I am just wondering if I should build my own firewall to put our web servers behind (using freebsd and ipfw) or is there a really good solution anyone could suggest to protect our servers?

Hardware or software..

Thanks,
Ryan Campbell
CyberScript.NET

We use Netscreen Hardware based firewalls and they are great. Have also used Cisco PIX firewalls and they are nice too. How much traffic and IPs do you anticipate using?

We don't normally get much traffic at all (maybe half a gig a day in transfer), but today someone uploaded a bunch of 24mb music files to our site and then sent from 200 to 300 requests a second to download these files. Not a very good start of the day.

We don't expect to use anymore than a few ip addresses. Right now we are only using 2 (one for our web server and one for our office firewall).

In the end I'm hoping to run our database driven sites (that is the only type of site we will be hosting) on a cluster of web servers that will all be behind 1 or 2 firewalls that protect and maybe even distribute traffic evenly across the web servers. (I'm more worried about security though right now since we only have one web server).

Thanks,
Ryan Campbell
CyberScript.NET

A Netscreen 5 would more than handle what you need and they are only like $250-$400 :)