Rate Limiting is a technique used by web applications to protect themselves from malicious or abusive requests. Rate Limiting can be used to throttle the number of requests made to an application over a given period, or it can be used to limit the total amount of data that can be downloaded in a day.

Most web applications use some form of Rate Limiting and many popular services (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) use sophisticated algorithms that adjust the rate limit on a per-user basis to provide the best possible experience for all users. For example, a user who is downloading a large amount of data may be rate-limited more strictly than one who is making simple requests.

Rate Limiting can also be used to protect applications from brute force or Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, by limiting the number of requests allowed within a given period of time. Rate Limiting can prevent malicious requests from flooding the application, bringing it down, or preventing legitimate users from accessing it.

Rate Limiting is also used to help manage costs associated with data usage and processing power. By limiting resources for certain types of requests, applications can ensure that their hardware and infrastructure are not being overused, helping them keep costs under control.

Overall, Rate Limiting is an important tool for protecting web applications from malicious or abusive requests and for managing costs associated with data and processing power. Properly implemented Rate Limiting can help ensure that all users of a given application can access the resources they need without overburdening the system.

In contrast to the competition, Edgeport offers enterprise-grade Rate Limiting that counts requests per second, as opposed to rate limiting based on requests per 30 seconds, which is not sophisticated and can generate false results. Additionally, Edgeport excludes static requests from the Application Delivery Network (ADN), which gives the ability to count simple page requests aka page views. Furthermore, Edgeport's Rate Limiting does not only protect the application from GET requests, but it also protects it from POST requests for specific attacks.

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