Hukumonline.com: “DataDome pays for itself.”

The Problem: Stolen content and inflated infrastructure costs.

For legal practitioners in Indonesia, Hukumonline.com is the go-to source of information. The website’s core service is to deliver daily news related to legal topics. For paying subscribers, Hukumonline offers additional services such as a regular newsletter and English translations of new laws. Users can also search the website’s impressive database of legal information.

Unsurprisingly, this rich source of valuable information attracts not only conscientious lawyers wanting to stay on top of their trade, but also certain visitors with less commendable motives.

“We could see from our internal analytics that bots were starting to crawl our website,” says Dedy Irawan, DevOps Manager at Hukumonline.com. “Over time, we have accumulated a huge amount of information and data related to the law, and our teams spend a great deal of effort to collect and structure the content. If this content is taken by third parties, it becomes our loss.”

The crawlers were not only scraping text from the website. When Hukumonline publishes new laws, they often also post corresponding files (typically pdf, Word or Excel) provided by the government. When the bots started downloading great volumes of such files, it resulted in significant website performance issues.

“It was very busy,” Dedy acknowledges. “We upgraded our server capacity to make sure we could serve normal users efficiently, but there’s no end to that. And for how long do you want to keep upgrading your infrastructure just to serve people who are of no benefit to you? So we decided to look for a solution that could help us filter out the bots and crawlers, and only allow genuine users to visit our website.”

The Solution: Efficient and cost-effective bot mitigation.

The team first approached a few vendors of WAF solutions, but quickly concluded that these were both too extensive and too expensive for Hukumonline’s needs. Then they found DataDome, which perfectly fit the bill: an efficient traffic filtering solution with a transparent, competitive price.

Dedy also appreciated the ease of integration of DataDome with Cloudflare, which leverages the Workers functionality. Workers receive events for every HTTP(S) request made to an application. When the DataDome module is installed, these events are triggered before the regular Cloudflare process. The DataDome logic is processed in a Workers function, and either blocks the request or lets Cloudflare continue the regular process.

“It was very fast and very simple,” Dedy confirms. “We integrated directly with our production site, and didn’t encounter any issues during the setup and integration process. The DataDome onboarding team was also very helpful, and ensured that everything went smoothly.”

The Results: Protected content and positive ROI.

The solution has kept its promises, protecting Hukumonline’s valuable content from being stolen by scraper bots and restoring the website performance.

“DataDome has proven efficient since the beginning, protecting our content and stabilizing our server load,” Dedy attests. “We can see that our infrastructure is now stable and the load is normal. The website is working well for our genuine users, and internally we can focus on other developments and initiatives.”

Most importantly, the elimination of large volumes of unwanted traffic has enabled Hukumonline to significantly reduce its infrastructure budget.

“We aim to be as efficient as possible in terms of cloud infrastructure, and always try to avoid server upgrades unless they are really urgent and strictly necessary,” Dedy explains. “By enabling us to right-size our server infrastructure, DataDome actually pays for itself.”