Status 429 error

[johnrichardson4Participant]

Hi,
I was getting a “Status 429 error” on my website recently. The problem only occurred when I tried to use your search plugin on my site. Also, it was MUCH more of a problem on the mobile version of the site.

So, I contacted my WordPress domain service provider and they said… “The error 429 is related to the fact that we implemented a rate limit to protect our customers from abusive requests /DDoS attacks. The error usually persists when you do too many requests to the server from one IP in a minute. More than 30 requests per minute from the same IP are causing the block.”

I never make 30 “requests” through your plugin in a minute… so, I’m assuming that your plugin is doing this in the background??

NOTES:
1. My domain service provider has “temporarily whitelisted” my domain so this error doesn’t occur (to buy me some time during this troubleshooting process).
2. See the attached image for the error I saw on my phone when conducting a search.

Please advise. Thanks.
John

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[Ernest MarcinkoKeymaster]

Hi,

I’m afraid this has nothing to do with the plugin, but your service provider. Request limiting will not solve any real DDOS issues, for that firewalls should be used instead. I have not heard of this type of anti DDOS measures in a long time. Request limiting is usually used for shared host servers, where the host tries to save some resources on the server side, when multiple clients are shared across the same server. It works for DDOS as well of course, but it can not distinguish between “good” and “bad” requests.

The plugin does not do any requests, other than when you make a search query – it can’t, it has to be triggered by a client (ie. user with a browser).
The only way to resolve this is by lifting the rate limits (or at least increasing it), as this is going to be least of your issues. When users start to navigate across your page, they could very quicly exhaust the rate limit, then this error is going to be presented to them.
See, when I navigated a few times, I was able to get the message already: https://i.imgur.com/x1aZK7r.png

Increasing the rate limit 10x may resolve this for a single user, but will not help in cases where multiple clients have the same IP addresses by any chance.

Best,
Ernest Marcinko
If you like my products, don't forget to rate them on codecanyon :)

[johnrichardson4Participant]

Hi Ernest,
Thanks for your very detailed response, much appreciated.

I’ll pass along your message to my service provider and see how they respond.

Regards,
John

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