Rate Limiting
Advanced traffic throttling
Rate Limiting controls the number of requests to applications, protecting against overload, brute force, and abuse. The system offers granular policies based on combinations of IP, HTTP headers, cookies, geographic location, and custom expressions. A sliding window algorithm ensures precise enforcement of limits without loopholes related to burst allowance. Integration with Bot Management allows different limits to be applied to humans and bots, protecting against credential stuffing while maintaining a good UX.
Enterprise-grade protection compliant with regulatory requirements and security standards
Fast deployment with minimal resource overhead
Dedicated support from a certified partner
Easy integration with your existing infrastructure
Key features
- Granular per-IP, per-session, and per-user limits with combined rules
- Custom expressions with a Wireshark-like language for advanced scenarios
- Sliding window counting eliminating burst abuse at window boundaries
- Different actions: block, challenge, log, custom response with retry-after header
- Per-rule analytics showing triggered requests and blocked traffic
Business benefits
- Protection against brute force, credential stuffing, and enumeration attacks
- Application stability during traffic spikes and viral events
- Infrastructure cost control by limiting expensive operations
- Enforcement of fair usage for API tiers and freemium models
- Protection against application-layer DDoS attacks (L7) with granular precision
Why Cloudflare?
A global security and performance network handling a significant share of the world's internet traffic. Cloudflare offers DDoS protection, WAF, Zero Trust network access, secure DNS, and many other services, protecting applications, APIs, and infrastructure from threats.
Need Rate Limiting in your organization?
As a certified Cloudflare partner, we'll help you deploy and configure the solution.