If you run a reasonably popular site there is a very good chance that you will get crawled by unscrupulous crawlers once in a while. The regular search crawlers from the popular search engines like the Google bot, Yahoo bot, Bing bot themselves are pretty intensive when they crawl sites but they do have limits on the number of pages crawled per visit and the number of simultaneous connections opened to your server. However there are lots of unscrupulous crawlers like spam bots, email harvesting bots and even some search engines who do not set any reasonable limits on the number of simultaneous connections to your server. There are hardware solutions that are available to prevent this but they may not be affordable for everybody. There is however a simple netstat based solution to prevent DDOS.