Web Application Firewalls and DDoS protection are two of the most confused products in security. They are sold side by side, sometimes bundled as if they were one thing, and regularly deployed in place of each other by teams who assume one covers the other. It does not. They solve adjacent but distinct problems, and a site that is serious about staying up needs both.
What a WAF Does
A WAF is a per-request decision engine. It inspects the content of each individual HTTP request against a ruleset and blocks the ones that look malicious — SQL injection, cross-site scripting, path traversal, SSRF and similar application-layer attacks. Its entire job is to judge whether a request is safe, and it implicitly assumes that the overall volume of requests is within normal bounds. A WAF does not care that ten thousand requests arrived this second; it cares what is inside each one.
What DDoS Protection Does
DDoS protection works at the opposite scale. It is about whether a request gets processed at all — absorbing or dropping overwhelming volumes of traffic through rate limiting, challenges and behavioural filtering before they exhaust your infrastructure. It does not inspect the request body for SQL injection; it decides whether the flood as a whole is allowed to reach your application. Volume is its whole concern, and content is not.
Outer shell and inner layer
Think of DDoS protection as the outer shell that keeps your infrastructure standing under attack, and the WAF as the inner layer that keeps the requests which do get through from harming your application. Remove either and the other cannot cover the gap.
Why You Need Both
- A WAF without DDoS protection: a flood of perfectly clean, WAF-passing requests still exhausts your server. Ten thousand valid searches per second take you down while the WAF nods each one through.
- DDoS protection without a WAF: you stay up under load, but a single injection or XSS request that slips through can still compromise your application.
- Together: the flood is filtered by volume and behaviour, and whatever survives is inspected for malicious content.
How Akarguard Combines Them
Akarguard's reverse proxy handles application-layer (L7) DDoS at the traffic layer — challenges, rate and connection limits, behavioural filtering — and hides your origin so a direct network flood has no target. It also carries a Naxsi-based WAF you manage from the panel, with per-category rules, sensitivity control, a live detections view and one-click false-positive whitelisting. You can run those WAF rules on the proxy or keep them on your origin behind it. The proxy filters the L7 flood; the WAF inspects the survivors — the two layers in one place, enabled by a single DNS change. (Raw volumetric floods, as always, are absorbed upstream at the network.)