Czech Budweis

The official website of the City of Czech Budweis is one of the most important sources of information for residents and visitors. People use it for official documents, forms, contacts, transport information, cultural events, and crisis communication.

A simple rule applies: when the city website does not work, citizens notice immediately.

In summer 2024, the city website became the target of repeated attacks that led to several-hour outages. The City Hall therefore decided to deploy WEDOS Global Protection (WGP) as an additional layer of protection and since then, things have been calm.

The main purpose of the city website is clear: to be a reliable information portal for citizens 24/7. Every day, thousands of people visit it looking for current information, documents, office hours, and official announcements.

The website offers in particular:

• interactive maps
• static forms to download and fill in
• clear information about the activities of the City Hall and city organizations

The website is maintained by a combination of an internal IT team and an external supplier; in practice, roughly three people are involved in its operation and administration. In addition to the main city portal, the city also operates several smaller specialized websites — for example for projects such as Juvel, the adaptation strategy, or the Slávie sports complex.

The city rates website availability on a scale of 1–5 as 4–5, i.e., as highly critical. It is especially important in situations such as floods, fires, or other emergencies, when citizens need verified information from a single official source.

Website traffic is very high and stable:

• according to Google Analytics, approx. 165 000 active users visited the website in the last month,
• WEDOS Global Protection processed over 5,4 million HTTP requests in the last 30 days,
• more than 130 000 unique IP addresses were recorded,
• traffic reached peaks of up to 66 632 requests per minute,
• an estimated hundreds of thousands of page views per month.

The vast majority of traffic comes from the Czech Republic; foreign visits are mainly bots and automated systems that index or test the website. That is why it is important to have control over robotic traffic.

The year 2024 was demanding for public-sector IT teams — many authorities in the Czech Republic and abroad faced coordinated attacks targeting websites of cities, hospitals, and regional institutions.
Czech Budweis became part of this broader wave in July and August 2024. The website was targeted by attacks that:

• significantly slowed down page loading
• led to website unavailability
• overloaded the infrastructure with extremely long search queries that gradually exhausted the server’s computing capacity

According to the IT team, the situation typically appeared early in the morning, peaked around noon, and repeated three times — each time resulting in roughly a half-day outage. For a city website that should be available to citizens continuously, this was unacceptable.

The main impulse for enabling WEDOS Global Protection was precisely these attacks and the associated outages. The city was looking for a solution that:

• would protect the website from bursty and malicious traffic
• would prevent outages and significant slowdowns
• would not burden administrators with complex management
• would fit into the existing infrastructure, including externally managed DNS.

In cooperation with WEDOS, a consultation took place and the decision was made to deploy WEDOS Global Protection as a protective layer on top of the existing setup.

The deployment of WGP took place in August 2024, i.e., during the ongoing period of increased attacks.
The entire process took only a few hours — it was necessary to:

• align the configuration with the internal IT team
• explain how WGP works
• coordinate the changes with the external company that manages the city’s DNS records

After switching traffic through WEDOS Global Protection, there was no deterioration in the user experience — the IT team notes, with a bit of exaggeration, that the website certainly did not slow down; quite the opposite.

After deploying WEDOS Global Protection, the situation changed significantly:

• attacks stopped causing slowdowns or outages
• the website began responding stably even during load peaks,
• malicious traffic is automatically filtered out before it burdens the city’s infrastructure,
• operation has been calm and outage-free in the long term.

WEDOS Global Protection continuously intercepts tens of thousands of suspicious HTTP requests per month. These are mainly bots, scanning, and attempts to overload the application, which would otherwise increase the load on the webserver/application and worsen response times for real visitors.

Protection reacts according to the type of behavior:

• 403 (Forbidden): the request is blocked outright (e.g., based on reputation, signature, a rule, or an obviously malicious pattern)
• 429 (Too Many Requests): requests are limited by a rate limit (typically at a high frequency from a single IP or to sensitive URLs such as search/login)
• CAPTCHA / rule-based filters: in the “grey zone”, verification or a gentler form of filtering is applied

Thanks to this, suspicious traffic does not reach the application at full strength and does not consume resources that should serve citizens.

The City Hall does not monitor robotic traffic in more detail, but from their point of view a simple summary applies: “Since deploying WGP, we have peace.”

One of the valued benefits is a real-time overview of what is happening on the website. Administrators have statistics and charts available (for example in Grafana), where they can see:

• traffic peaks
• types of blocked requests
• the overall load on the infrastructure

This allows them to plan capacity better and respond quickly if unusual behavior appears.

An outage of a city website today does not mean only a “technical problem”. In practice, it can cause:

• loss of important information for residents
• negative reactions on social networks
• complications in the office’s communication
• confusion in crisis situations (for example during floods or fires), when people rely on official sources

Even though part of crisis communication shifts to mobile channels, the website remains the central information point that citizens return to.

The City of Czech Budweis considers the availability of its website essential, and after its experience with attacks in summer 2024 it sees the benefits of additional protection very concretely.

Main benefits of WEDOS Global Protection for the city:

• stable website operation even under increased load
• protection against attacks and malicious traffic
• ensuring availability for citizens 24/7
• clear statistics and real-time monitoring
• simple management without the need for complex configuration

The city would recommend the service without hesitation to other public-sector institutions that want to be confident their website will hold up in demanding situations — whether it is a sudden traffic spike or targeted attacks.