Ladders Slashes Infrastructure Costs by 15-20% & Frees Up Time With DataDome

The Problem: Bots Steal Content, Cause Performance Issues, and Drive Up Direct & Indirect Costs

When Mathew Samuel first reached out to DataDome, his team was at their wit’s end trying to tackle relentless scraping activity and attacks on the website’s login page.

“We had been under attack for months. All that automated traffic was adding extra load to our servers, causing performance issues and outages, and driving up our infrastructure costs,” explains the VP of Technology. “We were also spending a lot of time trying to block it with our WAF, only to find that the attackers changed tactics or that we were blocking legitimate traffic.”

While the team didn’t count the actual engineer hours spent, they know that the indirect costs dwarfed the more tangible AWS bills. “Before we implemented DataDome, I was personally spending a third to maybe half my time on bot problems for months,” Mathew observes.

In addition, the manual blocking approach was completely reactive. The team had no idea how much time they would need to allocate to it next month or next week, and any plans they had could be torpedoed at any time by an attack. Stolen content, fewer upgrades, and a degraded site experience also added up to significant hidden costs.

The last straw was a particularly unrelenting scraper. While many scraper bots could be dealt with by blocking their IP addresses, one particular attacker spread its request over hundreds of IPs. And as soon as the team managed to identify a new signature, the attacker would adapt.

“It was a constant battle, and it was escalating,” says Mathew. “They were using IPs from all over the world, but as soon as we started to block more traffic from Russian and Chinese IPs, for example, they just started using more US IPs. So they were clearly using different proxies, and hiding well enough that our normal process of stopping them was becoming too difficult.”

The Solution: Easy to Test, Shared Intelligence

When the team started their search for a more sustainable bot protection solution, DataDome stood out with positive user reviews and an easy free trial process.

“A number of competing solutions were prohibitively expensive, and required a yearly commitment right away,” Mathew notes. “Others required us to switch to their CDN, or it was unclear what would happen once they were set up. We didn’t want to make a lot of changes or go through a huge installation process; this was an important requirement for us.”

The setup went smoothly, and the team could soon observe the detailed traffic data in their DataDome dashboard. During the free trial period, DataDome works in monitoring mode: not blocking or otherwise interacting with traffic, but analyzing and classifying all incoming requests. In fact, the Ladders team was able to use their dashboard data to stop an ongoing bot attack with the AWS WAF.

“A big difference between DataDome and our in-house scripts is that we only see attacks on ourselves,” Mathew reflects.

The Results: 15-20% Infrastructure Cost Reduction, Freed-Up Time & Mental Space

Since Ladders activated DataDome’s bot protection and started blocking unwanted traffic, the team has significantly reduced their infrastructure costs.

“It’s hard to give an exact figure because we’ve had an increase in legitimate traffic, but my rough guesstimate is that we have about 15-20% lower data transfer costs, perhaps even more,” Mathew confirms.

Besides the cost savings, he greatly appreciates not having to worry about bot-related issues anymore.

“Being able to offload all that effort, getting back our time and mental space, is huge,” he says. “We’ve sunsetted all our internal scripts and eliminated all the indirect costs as well. It’s taken a huge load off our backs, serves our needs perfectly, and helps us focus on our core skills rather than fighting bots. It’s been a very positive experience so far.”