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

How about something like this on PHP side:

//if user does not change IP, then ban the IP when more than 10 requests per second are detected in 1 second
$limitps = 10;
if (!isset($_SESSION['first_request'])){
    $_SESSION['requests'] = 0;
    $_SESSION['first_request'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'];
}
$_SESSION['requests']++;
if ($_SESSION['requests']>=10 && strtotime($_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'])-strtotime($_SESSION['first_request'])<=1){
    //write the IP to a banned_ips.log file and configure your server to retrieve the banned ips from there - now you will be handling this IP outside of PHP
    $_SESSION['banip']==1;
}elseif(strtotime($_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'])-strtotime($_SESSION['first_request']) > 2){
    $_SESSION['requests'] = 0;
    $_SESSION['first_request'] = $_SERVER['REQUEST_TIME'];
}

if ($_SESSION['banip']==1) {
    header('HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable');
    die;
}