MaxiSafe keeps a Philippine news site fast and protected from attacks

A leading Philippine business news publisher, with a readership in the hundreds of thousands across the Philippines and Southeast Asia, sees traffic multiply within minutes when markets move, policy decisions are announced or scheduled content goes live.

The Challenge

High readership demand and constant background threats create unique pressures for a news site.

Like most large news sites, there is also a constant background of security risk: bots scraping, non-compliant crawling on pages and content APIs, as well as application-layer (L7) request floods. High site traffic doesn’t cause these threats, but it does raise the stakes as performance headroom tightens and malicious requests become harder to separate from real ones.

The objectives are clear.

Stay fast and available through surges
Filter malicious bots and abusive traffic such as L7 DDoS attacks and aggressive scraping/crawling, without blocking good bots and genuine readers
Keep publishing uninterrupted with no feature throttles during live coverage

Location
Philippines

Industry
News, Media

Solution
MaxiSafe

Learn more
How MaxiSafe works
Pricing & Plans

The MaxiSafe Solution

MaxiSafe combines delivery and security to address both performance and application-layer risks.

Edge caching and content acceleration

MaxiSafe’s built-in CDN accelerates web application performance by serving content at the edge. Article and section templates are cached with sensible rules, and when stories update, only the affected pages refresh within milli-seconds. This reduces unnecessary load on the application and keeps response times steady during traffic surges.

Layered security against malicious bots and L7 attacks

With delivery close to end users, the next job is protection. MaxiSafe inspects requests across the site and the content APIs as they arrive, allowing real users and recognised bots/crawlers to pass while stepping in early when behaviour drifts from genuine use.

Also, abusive patterns at the application layer were contained upstream so the web experience remains smooth, and the newsroom kept working. And with MaxiSafe’s AI-driven web application firewall (AI-WAF) in place, the website was guarded against common web-attack techniques and could also react to anomalies that indicate emerging threats.

MaxiSafe filters threats at the edge for protected, fast response

MaxiSafe features used:

Content Acceleration (built-in CDN): edge caching and delivery to keep latency low and availability high during surges
DDoS Mitigation: filters volumetric spikes and application-layer (L7) request floods, handled upstream to protect responsiveness
Bot Management: detects and limits bot scraping and non-compliant crawling, while allowing recognised, legitimate bots to work as intended
AI-WAF: AI-assisted inspection covers known attacks and flags anomalies that suggest emerging threats

Results

The publisher achieves speed, stability, and safety even at peak demand.

Through busy news cycles and planned announcements, the experience held steady. Pages loaded at the pace readers expect and the site stayed online throughout; editors kept publishing at will, without having to switch features off or pausing coverage.

With a large share of requests served at the edge and controls acting at the application layer, the backend remained predictable, and the team spent less time firefighting.

Fast at peak: pages remained quick during surges, with 80% of requests served from cache
High availability: the site stayed online at 99.99% uptime
Protected experience: Malicious bots and L7 attacks were held back; genuine users unaffected