If it is a learning process, maybe with a few tweaks you may find ways to contain them otherwise as you said the bigger dedicated server might help.
If your latest DDoS protection is holding up and providing adequate protection from any possible attack without using any 3rd party software then that is good. When I last visited the clearnet website earlier today to see if the page loads, it took a long time before the 5 second DDoS countdown loaded and after that it took well over a minute for the page to load before I gave up.
Eventually this message showed. Is it because the website is really under maintenance or because that is the new default message when the website is under DDoS:
It looks like it's not holding up, so please use the Tor version for now. Please keep in mind that no matter if the clearnet version is offline, the Tor version will always work flawlessly.
We tried solving the issue only through software updates, and for a while we did, but the intensity of the attack is growing by the day and the current clearnet VPS is way too weak and cannot handle it. We will upgrade to a much bigger dedicated server and we expect the issues to be solved at least to a certain degree after that.