Blog
Field notes on DDoS protection, WAFs, API security, and stopping bots. Written by the team building Karbon.
What Is Bot Traffic?
Bot traffic is web traffic generated by automated programs rather than human users. Here's what it is, the types of bots, and why it matters for your site.
What Is Rate Limiting?
Rate limiting controls how many requests a client can make in a given time window. It's a foundational defense against abuse, DDoS, and API overuse.
What Is a Reverse Proxy?
A reverse proxy intercepts requests before they reach your server. Here's a plain-English explanation of what it does and why it's a core piece of modern web infrastructure.
What Is Anycast Routing?
Anycast routing lets the same IP address resolve to different servers in different locations. It's the technology behind fast CDNs and DDoS-resilient networks.
What Is a CDN and How Does It Work?
A CDN (Content Delivery Network) speeds up websites by serving content from servers close to users. Here's how it works and why most public websites use one.
What Is a Proxy Server (Simple Explanation)
A proxy server acts as an intermediary between clients and servers. Here's a clear, jargon-free explanation of what proxies do, the types, and when you'd use one.
Building Infrastructure Visibility Before Product-Market Fit
PMF is partly an infrastructure question. You can't measure real traction if your traffic data is full of bots, your analytics tool misses 30% of visits, and your security posture is unknown.
Cost of Ignoring Bot Traffic for Growing Startups
Bot traffic isn't just a nuisance. For growing startups, ignoring it has concrete costs: wasted compute, corrupted analytics, and security exposure. Here's the full picture.
Why Scaling Websites Breaks Silently, Not Loudly
The worst scaling failures aren't crashes or errors. They're slow degradation that looks like a metrics plateau until users start leaving. Here's what that looks like.
Infrastructure Mistakes Early-Stage SaaS Companies Make
Early infrastructure decisions have long tails. These are the mistakes that seem harmless at 10 users but become expensive problems at 10,000.
How Startups Lose Traffic Without Noticing It
Traffic loss is often invisible until it's severe. Misattribution, bot inflation, and silent CDN errors all mask what's really happening to your user traffic.
Why Traditional Firewalls Are Not Enough Anymore
Network firewalls were designed for a different threat model. Here's why they fail against modern web attacks and what you need alongside them.
The Hidden Economy of Bots on the Internet
Bot traffic isn't random noise. There's a sophisticated economy behind it: bot-as-a-service platforms, bot rental markets, and the specific business models that make automated abuse profitable.
Every Website Is Already Under Automated Scanning
If you have a public IP address, automated scanners are already probing your endpoints. This is not hypothetical. Here's the scale and what it means for your security posture.
The Future of Traffic Monitoring Is Not Analytics
Traditional analytics answers 'who visited'. The next generation of traffic monitoring answers 'what is happening right now and should I be worried'. The shift is already underway.
Why Modern Websites Are Blind Without Edge Intelligence
Application-level monitoring only sees traffic that reaches the application. A significant fraction of internet traffic never makes it that far, and you can't defend what you can't see.
The Invisible Layer of the Internet Nobody Talks About
Between users and your application sits an invisible layer of routing, filtering, and inspection. Most developers never think about it. Attackers do.
Building a Real-Time Traffic Intelligence Layer
A traffic intelligence layer sits between raw logs and actionable decisions. Here's how to design one and what it gives you that basic monitoring can't.
Why Logs Alone Are Not Enough Anymore
Web server logs were the original observability tool. They're still valuable but fundamentally insufficient for modern threat detection and infrastructure intelligence.
What 'Observability' Means for Web Infrastructure
Observability is a popular term but often vaguely defined. Here's what it means in practice for web infrastructure: the three pillars and why they're not enough on their own.
Real-Time Traffic Monitoring Techniques for Websites
Real-time monitoring is the difference between catching an attack in progress and finding out after the damage is done. Here are the techniques that make it work.
How to Track Bot Traffic Separately from Real Users
Mixing bot and user traffic in the same analytics dataset corrupts every metric. Here's how to identify, separate, and report on bot traffic without polluting your product data.
Server-Side Analytics vs Client-Side Analytics
Client-side and server-side analytics each have blind spots. Understanding what each captures (and misses) helps you build a complete traffic picture.
Why Google Analytics Misses Real Traffic Sources
Google Analytics gives a client-side view of traffic. That means it misses bots, headless browsers, blocked scripts, and server-direct requests. Here's what falls through the cracks.
Building Resilient APIs Under Heavy Load
APIs that work fine at low traffic often degrade badly under load. Here are the patterns that separate APIs that survive spikes from ones that fall over.
How Traffic Inspection Works at the Edge
Edge traffic inspection is how WAFs, bot detection, and DDoS mitigation operate in real time. Here's what actually happens to a request as it passes through an edge security layer.
Understanding Request Routing in Global Networks
How does a request from Tokyo reach a server in Frankfurt in 50ms? A practical explanation of DNS routing, BGP, anycast, and how traffic finds its destination.
How Edge Computing Changes Website Performance
Edge computing moves compute closer to users instead of running everything in a central data center. Here's how it improves performance and what it means for security.
CDN vs Reverse Proxy: Key Differences Explained
CDNs and reverse proxies are often confused. They overlap but serve different primary purposes. Here's a clear breakdown of what each does and when you need both.
How Reverse Proxies Actually Work Behind Websites
A reverse proxy sits between the internet and your origin server. Here's what it does, how it differs from a forward proxy, and why most web infrastructure uses one.
What Is an Anycast Network and Why It Matters for Latency
Anycast routing lets multiple servers share the same IP address. It's the backbone of CDNs and DDoS mitigation networks. Here's how it works and why it reduces latency.
Top OWASP Vulnerabilities Explained
A concise walkthrough of the OWASP Top 10 web application risks: injection, broken access control, SSRF, and more, with how a WAF mitigates each.
Rate Limiting Strategies for Modern APIs
Rate limiting is more than a cap on requests per minute. A guide to the strategies, algorithms, and key choices that determine whether your limits actually work.
What 'Clean Traffic Filtering' Means in Modern Networks
Clean traffic filtering is a core concept in DDoS mitigation. Here's how it works, where it happens in the network stack, and what it actually filters out.
Bot Mitigation Techniques Used by Large Platforms
How do companies like Google, Amazon, and major banks stop bots at scale? A breakdown of the techniques large platforms use and how they apply to smaller teams.
How to Detect Early-Stage DDoS Before Downtime Happens
By the time your site goes down, a DDoS attack is already past the point where it's easy to stop. Here are the early signals to watch for.
Why Small Websites Are Increasingly Targeted by Bots
Small websites are not too small to attract bots. In fact, they're often easier targets. Here's why automated traffic hits sites of every size.
How DDoS Attacks Work: A Simple Breakdown
A plain-English explanation of how DDoS attacks work, from volumetric floods to application-layer abuse, and why they're increasingly common.
What Happens When Your Site Goes Viral (Technically)
Viral traffic is exciting but technically brutal. Here's what actually happens to your infrastructure during a viral spike and how to survive it.
How CDN Caching Affects Traffic Visibility
CDN caching is great for performance but it creates blind spots in your traffic data. Learn what gets hidden and how to restore visibility.
Understanding Sudden Referral Spikes from Unknown Sources
A spike from a domain you've never heard of isn't always a PR win. Learn the common causes including referrer spam, scrapers, and automated link testing.
Why Your Website Traffic Data Is Often Wrong
Traffic reports look precise but they're full of noise: bots, crawlers, tag failures, ad fraud, and sampling errors. Here's what's distorting your numbers.
Bot Traffic vs Real Users: Detecting Hidden Patterns
Most analytics tools don't separate bot traffic from real users. Learn the behavioral signals that reveal automated traffic hiding in your data.
What Is Internet Exposure Drift?
Internet exposure drift describes how your publicly reachable attack surface quietly expands over time without deliberate action. Here's why it happens and how to track it.
How Websites Get Unexpected Traffic Spikes
Sudden traffic spikes aren't always good news. This post breaks down the real causes: viral content, bot floods, scraper bursts, and misconfigured crawlers.
How to Secure APIs Against Bot Attacks
Credential stuffing, scraping, and token cracking all hit APIs through bots. A practical guide to fingerprinting, rate limiting, and challenging automated traffic.
What Is Shadow API Discovery?
Shadow APIs are undocumented endpoints attackers love. Learn what they are, how they appear, and how traffic-based discovery finds them before attackers do.
Cloudflare vs Self-Hosted DDoS Protection
Should you buy managed DDoS protection or build your own? A practical comparison of cost, latency, capacity, and operational burden for startups.
How Layer 7 DDoS Attacks Work
A plain-English breakdown of Layer 7 (application-layer) DDoS attacks: how they differ from volumetric floods, why they're hard to spot, and how to defend.