Title is misleading. When I read "go dark" I think of a service doing the clever thing and burrowing itself in the darkweb where it's nearly impossible to take down (unless it gets DDOSed of course).
But even DDOS'ing can be mitigated by hardening your server, and doing rudimentary things like rate limiting and filtering out bots with captchas. Things are made even easier by using a tricked out NGINX[0] server or even Varnish cache[1].
Just as a sidenote: X-raying PCBs and then diffing them against clean PCBs is a worthwhile thing to do if you're concerned about hardware backdoors, or 'interdiction' of hardware in a supply chain. I do this sometimes when ordering super-critical equipment like Thinkpads from the U.S as you never know what lurks on the motherboard (keyloggers, etc).
I have a clean Thinkpad that I use to compare against potential backdoored devices. So far I haven't spotted any differences in the PCBs. I guess the intelligence agencies have not marked me as important enough to target. That being said, I imagine there are people working in the cryptocurrency space who have a lot to hide (if you own their boxes, you could be looking at thefts worth millions of dollars, or whatever the equivalent is in the cryptocurrency they are developing).
But even DDOS'ing can be mitigated by hardening your server, and doing rudimentary things like rate limiting and filtering out bots with captchas. Things are made even easier by using a tricked out NGINX[0] server or even Varnish cache[1].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nginx
[1] https://www.varnish-cache.org/