Tagged #web-development

Light in a fiber cable is fast, but it isn't instant. If a website lives on one server in Virginia and you're loading it from Sydney, every request has to cross an ocean and come back. A modern page might need dozens of files (images, scripts, fonts, stylesheets), and all those round trips add up to a page that feels sluggish even on a great connection. You can't make the planet smaller. What you can do is move the files closer to the people asking for them. That's what a CDN is. Content delivery network. It's a company that runs a lot of servers in a lot of cities (they call them edge…

Every endpoint on your app is an open invitation to send requests. Most visitors send a few. Some scripts will send as many as your server can take. Rate limiting is just the rule that says "this many, this fast, and no more." It's one of those features nobody notices when it's there and everybody notices when it isn't. Here's what it protects you from. Brute force on your login page. Without a limit, an attacker can try password after password as fast as your server answers. Even with good password hashing, you don't want to give them unlimited attempts. Abuse of expensive actions. Sending a…