How I Protected My Express API from Spam and High AI Costs Using Redis

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When I was building my backend API, I realized a big problem: anyone could spam my endpoints. If a user repeatedly reloads a page or hits an endpoint calling an external AI service, it can crash the server or run up high API costs. To fix this, I added Rate Limiting. Here is why I used Redis for it and how I set it up. At first, I thought about saving request counts in a simple JavaScript object: // ❌ Simple in-memory check (Not good for production) const requestCounts = {}; app.use((req, res, next) => { const ip = req.ip; requestCounts[ip] = (requestCounts[ip] || 0) + 1; if (requestCounts[ip]

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