I have a docker running nginx which returns 444 when $host is unknown. This causes Elastic Beanstalk (EB) to see it as 5xx error. When too many such requests are terminated, EB thinks that the health of the EC2 instance has degraded and proceeds to replace it. Nginx, in my docker is doing the correct thing by preventing attacks from unknown hosts. But then addition and removal of EC2 instances affects my users.
Is there any any alternative to 444 that I can use which is not perceived as 5xx but is still secure ? Thanks.