TIL: Rate limiting by IP using Cloudflare's rate limiting rules. My blog started timing out on some requests a few days ago, and it turned out there were misbehaving crawlers that were spidering my /search/ page even though it's restricted by robots.txt.
I run this site behind Cloudflare and it turns out Cloudflare's WAF (Web Application Firewall) has a rate limiting tool that I could use to restrict requests to /search/* by a specific IP to a maximum of 5 every 10 seconds.
Recent articles
- Useful patterns for building HTML tools - 10th December 2025
- Under the hood of Canada Spends with Brendan Samek - 9th December 2025
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025