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Rate limiting

Rate limiting is a crucial aspect of web application security. It helps prevent various types of attacks such as brute force and enumeration attacks, Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), and site scraping. This technique is designed to restrict access to resources for clients that generate excessive requests.

Peakhour.IO provides a sophisticated solution for rate limiting, offering a variety of methods for selecting clients to rate limit and the types of rate limits that can be applied. You can enhance your rate limiting configurations by using rule lists to manage sets of IP addresses, ASNs, or other criteria.

Stopping Attacks with Rate Limiting#

Rate limiting is not just limited to stopping malicious attacks on web applications. It can also protect APIs and other endpoints from abuse or misuse, while maintaining service availability.

How Rate Limiting Works#

Rate limiting focuses on the client and their IP address. Peakhour.IO offers several measures for tracking client requests, including:

  1. Concurrent connections
  2. Connections per interval
  3. Hits per interval
  4. HTTP 4xx responses per interval
  5. HTTP 5xx responses per interval
  6. Custom criteria

Granular Rate Limiting#

Peakhour.IO's wirefilter rules allow for granular rate limiting by identifying clients using both the HTTP request and response. This allows for segregation of rate limits based on specific criteria, such as URL, response codes, GeoIP information, parsed user agent information, and various meta information from Peakhour's BOT protection service.

Defining Your Rate Limits#

Defining appropriate rate limits can be challenging without adequate analytics. The Peakhour dashboard provides rate-based analytics to help you with the setup process.

If you're looking for a secure and effective solution to protect your website, rate limiting with Peakhour.IO can be an excellent option. If you have any questions or need further assistance, reach out to Peakhour support.