Hydradyne Ends Competitor Price Scraping & Reduces Servers with DataDome
Hydradyne is one of the largest motion control distribution companies in North America, with more than 900,000 products in its online catalog. Protecting its proprietary product data has always been a top priority to ensure that competitors and unauthorized scrapers couldn’t exploit its pricing data. As bot-driven threats evolved beyond scraping to include fake accounts, credential stuffing, and payment fraud, Hydradyne needed a proactive & adaptable solution. DataDome helped the company safeguard its data and digital storefront, significantly reducing unwanted traffic while optimizing infrastructure performance. With bot protection deployed at the edge, the company benefits from real-time threat mitigation without overloading its internal servers.
The challenge: Protecting Hydradyne’s product, price, & availability data from aggressive scraping
In the industrial distribution world, the adoption of e-commerce has accelerated, but with it, so has the risk of data theft. Over 10 years ago, Hydradyne launched its first e-commerce platform with 15,000 products. Shortly after, the company undertook a project to enrich product data for 100,000 items, and this investment required strong protection against competitors and unauthorized scrapers.
“Getting data such as enriched images and PDFs for all those products was a significant investment. Protecting that data wasn’t an afterthought, it was a requirement,” explains Felipe Maurer, E-commerce General Manager at Hydradyne.
In addition to product information, Hydradyne also wanted to protect its pricing and availability data, which can directly impact sales.
“We are in a competitive market, where price and availability are key differentiators,” Felipe observes. “If our competitors can just come in and scrape that data, it’s easy for them to beat us on price. We couldn’t let that happen.”
At first, Hydradyne relied on load balancers with built-in rate limiting to manage unwanted bot traffic. However, this approach quickly showed its limitations. “It was very clunky and hard to manage”, Felipe recalls. “We had no real visibility, and everything was IP-based. Worse, these devices had minimal local storage, so we couldn’t even log attack data properly.”
The turning point came when Hydradyne decided to migrate its infrastructure to Microsoft Azure, leaving behind the load balancers. This shift required a purpose-built, scalable bot mitigation solution capable of not only blocking scrapers in real time but also adapting to evolving threats such as credential stuffing, fake accounts, and payment fraud.
The solution: Easy deployment, immediate visibility, & strong ROI
As part of its evaluation process, Hydradyne independently researched bot management vendors without any third-party recommendation. They considered other alternatives, but none inspired confidence in their detection accuracy or ability to scale with Hydradyne’s needs. DataDome stood out early as the best fit. “DataDome struck me as being very well documented, and this is coming from a developer,” Felipe says. “The documentation was easy to find, easy to navigate, and easy to follow. The whole setup took about 30 minutes.”
With support from a DataDome Solution Engineer, Hydradyne was able to verify correct installation and immediately start monitoring traffic. However, Felipe emphasizes that even without assistance, the process was so intuitive that he could have installed it himself.
Once the Vulnerability Scan was deployed, DataDome analyzed all incoming traffic and provided detailed insights via its real-time dashboard. This visibility into attack patterns became a critical factor in the decision-making process.
“The assessment really helped us make the decision,” Felipe confirms. “DataDome provided great visibility into the scraping attacks we were receiving, how they were impacting our system, and how the rate limiting was being bypassed. With our previous solution, we were unable to tell exactly how much it was protecting us, and the budget item was regularly questioned. The DataDome reports made it very easy for me to go upstream internally and show that yes, people are trying to take our data and yes, this will be worth the investment.”
The results: Protected data, optimized infrastructure, & enhanced visibility
Today, DataDome protects all Hydradyne’s essential e-commerce data. The protection has put an end to automated scraping of product, price, and availability information, and offers Felipe and his team detailed insights into their bot traffic, which consistently accounts for 40–60% of total incoming requests, all bot categories combined.
“It’s very easy to see the heavy lifting that DataDome is doing to protect the infrastructure, adapting to shifting IPs, user agents, fake browsers, and so on,” he comments. “That visibility is really helpful, and in fact ensures the continued use of the solution.”
Custom rules also play a role in Hydradyne’s bot management strategy. They are used in two key scenarios: to quickly resolve false positives for legitimate customers who might get mistakenly blocked, and when specific scraping behaviors slip through the cracks, although Felipe acknowledges that a manual approach to bot mitigation is always a short-term fix.
Initially, blocking bots was done at the IIS server level, but Hydradyne realized that this did not reduce the load on the infrastructure. After a major scraping attack in mid-2023, they chose to implement DataDome’s managed edge integration to intercept malicious traffic before it ever hits the server. This architectural shift significantly improved both security and system performance.
Eliminating all unwanted bot traffic has also enabled Hydradyne to reduce its server capacity from two servers to one. For a lean IT team, having one less server to manage, secure, and update is an appreciable benefit.
Felipe emphasizes that many businesses underestimate the extent of their bot traffic until they take a closer look: “Most companies don’t realize how much scraping is happening. If you don’t have an anti-scraping solution, you’re probably unaware of the scale of the problem. I’d recommend taking DataDome’s Vulnerability Scan, it will show you exactly what’s hitting your site.”
Beyond technology, Hydradyne has enjoyed working with the DataDome team. “Support has been fantastic overall,” Felipe says. “The team is responsive, and they help us fine-tune protection when needed. When a bot attack happens, we know we have experts backing us up.”
If you’re wondering how much bot-driven fraud is affecting your website, it’s time to get real insights. Take our free Vulnerability Scan today!
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