Sorry for the flippancy, what I meant was it's just 1 application layer protocol (HTTP) amongst the multitude you could potentially be serving. Trying to fix for that one service means nothing, big picture, to people who know how to suppress a network, broad spectrum. Think ICMP, UDP, TCP, routing protocols (BGP if they're feeling sassy), everything that happens on the wire and in the kernel and through upstream ISP's before it even reaches your web server - HTTP protocol handling is literally the last bastion of hope in a DDOS scenario.