How to enable DDoS protection?

Question

DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service Attacks) are generally blocked on a server level right?

Is there a way to block it on a PHP level, or at least reduce it?

Answer 1

The php level is too late in the request chain.

Putting your apache server behind an open source appliance may be a good option for you.

http://tengine.taobao.org/ has some documentation and source code more modules aimed at DDOS prevention. It is a expansion of nginx, so you can easily set it up as a reverse proxy for your apache instance.

See: http://blog.zhuzhaoyuan.com/2012/01/a-mechanism-to-help-write-web-application-firewalls-for-nginx/ for how to fight collision has DoS attacks.

Totally forgot too, http://www.cloudflare.com is one the top free web application firewall, they have free and paid plans and will save your ass from DDOS we use it for alot of our high traffic sites just for its caching capabilities. It is awsome!