DirectVelo Gains Speed With DataDome

Significant savings

A more available site & better UX

Less time spent soliciting customer support

Media & entertainment Scraping

Web scrapers—bots that continuously scrape content from the internet, with the aim of reselling it or republishing it themselves—are not only interested in corporate sites. Any website offering valuable content can be targeted.

The team behind DirectVelo, a non-profit organization, learned this the hard way.

DirectVelo’s aim is to promote and develop the cycle sport, primarily through its website DirectVelo.com. Over time, it has become the leading French-language website for cycling news.

The editorial team offers daily news, interviews and race results, as well as photos and video footage. The site also offers live coverage of events, from junior races to major professional competitions.

The Problem: Bot traffic hitting DirectVelo.com.

The website managers began to notice peaks in traffic, sometimes occurring at unusual times of the day.

These peaks often resulted in longer loading times. And when they occurred at the same time as important events, such as the live coverage of the French Championships, they could even render the site unavailable.

We knew that our problems were partly due to bot traffic to the site, but we didn’t want to constantly increase the server infrastructure. Rather, we wanted to focus on resolving these availability issues by filtering access to the site and optimizing our entire platform. We therefore started to research potential solutions.

Michaël Gilson, President of DirectVelo

First, DirectVelo turned to its hosting company, which could temporarily stop bots from accessing parts of the site when their traffic created problems.

These interventions enabled the team to manage emergencies, but couldn’t prevent them. It was also a manual effort, fraught with the risk of human error, and which couldn’t distinguish between good and bad bot traffic.

The team therefore set out to find a more sustainable and more efficient solution.

The Solution: DataDome protection.

Phase 1: Analysis

The collaboration with DataDome began with a two-week test phase, during which no protection was activated, in order to establish a Traffic Quality Report. This analysis exposes real site traffic, including bot traffic that isn’t detected by tools like Google Analytics.

The analysis revealed significant bad bot traffic, in particular web scrapers which were primarily targeting DirectVelo.com’s articles and race results.

Phase 2: Activating the Protection

The installation and configuration of the DataDome module was carried out by the site’s hosting company, ATE. Their technicians worked together with the DataDome team to optimize the deployment and fine-tune the configuration.

As soon as the DataDome protection was activated, the bad bot traffic plummeted and the site’s performance was restored.

The website protection is now automated, but the DirectVelo team continues to keep an eye on the statistics. Among the bad bots that are blocked, web scrapers remain the most active by far.

DirectVelo_bad_bots_avant-apres

Directvelo-scrapers

The Results: Savings on server costs & time.

By blocking unwanted bots from the site, DirectVelo was able to avoid the deployment of new servers and the costs that this would have generated.

Thanks to the automated protection, the DirectVelo team also spends less time exchanging with the hosting company’s customer support. As the DataDome dashboard makes it very easy to adjust blocking parameters, it is no longer necessary to contact the host in order to block unwanted traffic.

And as the team is no longer busy managing emergencies, it can focus on optimizing the site infrastructure and creating fresh content for the site, for the enjoyment of all cycling enthusiasts.

One tends to act hastily, preferring to increase server capacity. Our experience with DataDome shows that it’s better to take a step back and find the most appropriate solution instead of the quickest.

Michaël Gilson, President of DirectVelo