How DataDome Helps eTool Developers Maintain 100% Uptime & Keep Customers Happy

The Problem: Aggressive Scraping Causes Downtime, Stress, and Frustrated Customers

“The internet is like a war zone these days,” says Will Brown, President of eTool Developers. “We’ve been in business for more than two decades, but it’s only in the last few years that bot traffic has really become an issue. Attackers have more and more computing power, and I think it’s only going to get worse.”

With more than 100 websites built on its custom e-commerce platform, thousands of orders are processed through eTool Developers’ technology every day. Unfortunately, auto enthusiasts in search of the perfect part aren’t the only ones soliciting their infrastructure.  

“Our web hosting environment is dimensioned to support a certain number of concurrent users, browsing and clicking and requesting assets on the web,” Will explains. “But all of a sudden, a bot would come in on one of our sites—and it could be any of them—and scrape it so violently that the server was filled up with requests, and the websites went offline.”

Calling the data center and blocking IPs would usually solve the incident in 10-15 minutes, but 15 minutes of downtime on 100 websites represents real-life costs. And when outages started to happen three to four times per week, it became a major source of stress and distraction.

“If one website got overloaded, it would affect our entire server architecture,” Will observes. “It was a really, really tough position.”

The Solution: Cloud-Based, Fastly-Compatible Bot Mitigation and DDoS Protection

To try to mitigate the issue, Will and his team deployed the Fastly CDN across all their sites. While the measure helped eliminate around half the traffic and reduce the number of outages, bots would still occasionally overload the server. Next, they implemented the Fastly WAF.

“The WAF did a pretty good job of identifying bots, but it has to analyze traffic while it’s happening before it can block anything,” Will points out. “It takes a few minutes for it to kick in, so we were still having this situation where multiple times per week, we’d be down for 5 minutes. That’s certainly better than 15 minutes, but we were still going down.”

Facing the fact that rate limiting and firewalls had not put a stop to the noise, he started to look for a tool that could do both bot mitigation and DDoS prevention.

“We felt like most of our outages were caused by scrapers who didn’t necessarily know what they were doing, but we also wanted to be protected from the really malicious attacks that just throw a ridiculous amount of distributed traffic at you,” Will explains. 

“Furthermore, I wanted a tool that works with Fastly and that runs at the edge, before the requests even get to our servers. So when I found DataDome, I went ahead and started the free trial right away. Installing the software was very easy, and it was great that we didn’t have to do any DNS changes. For a lot of our websites, we don’t actually have DNS control, so I was happy that I didn’t have to go to our clients’ IT departments and plead my case for making those record changes.”

The Results: 100% Uptime, 20+ Hours Saved Per Month

The first look at the DataDome dashboard was eye-opening: “Well over half of our traffic was automated,” Will recalls. “That share has gone down a bit now that some people have realized they can’t scrape our clients anymore, but it’s still quite high. That’s a lot of CPU and memory cycles just to serve fake users, so it’s great that we don’t have to deal with that sort of technical debt anymore.”

Since they activated the protection, eTool Developers has enjoyed stable performance, and their teams can focus on more productive topics. Most importantly, downtime and customer complaints are things of the past.

“For an e-commerce provider, availability is table stakes,” Will observes. “We’re hosting our clients’ online presence, and if the first thing their customers see is an error screen, we have a problem. DataDome has taken a lot of stress off our backs. We can sleep well at night, knowing that we’re not upsetting our client base with unnecessary outages that are outside our control.”

As for time savings, he estimates that implementing DataDome has freed up around 20 hours of a network engineer’s time per month. Instead of handling crisis response—pure loss and opportunity cost—that time can now be spent on billable, productive items.

Going forward, eTool Developers expects mobile applications to be in greater demand, and they appreciate that DataDome offers mobile app protection as well.

“We’re not yet a full-scale mobile app development studio, but as we’re starting to build more applications, it’s good to know that we already have a solution that supports that next layer of architecture,” Will concludes.