Northland Properties Boosts Web Performance & Slashes Infrastructure Costs With DataDome

As is typical in the hospitality industry, Northland Properties’s primary bot problem was web scraping. In particular, the scraper bots were aggressively targeting pricing information on the company’s hotel websites.

“We continually adjust the prices of different rooms in different hotels, so people would use bots to automatically index those changes,” says Ben Norouzizadeh, software development team lead at Northland Properties. “Sometimes, the extent of the attacks would create such a big load that the server actually went down. It was very insidious.”

The company’s current website stack was originally developed in the UK, he explains. When Northland took it over in 2019, they inherited a bot protection solution with it. Provided by one of the North American bot management giants, the solution nonetheless turned out to be unsatisfactory.

“We stayed with that solution for a few months, but then we started experiencing issues with it,” Ben observes. “Most importantly, our bot management software was blocking good bots, including the Google crawler which could no longer index our pages. We therefore decided to replace it.”

The Solution: 30-Minute Setup & Accurate Detection

When Ben and his team started to look for a new solution, the main criteria of choice—besides correct identification of the Google bot—was ease of implementation. The solution needed to fit into the existing architecture, without any custom code development or other big changes to the site.

Northland Properties uses Cloudflare for DNS management and other services. So when the team discovered the DataDome Cloudflare module, available as a Cloudflare Marketplace app, that was one of the decisive factors.

“Onboarding was a very pleasant experience,” says Ben. “We had an online session where the DataDome team walked us through how to install the Cloudflare module and optimize the configuration. It took us maybe 30 minutes to set up everything.”

Because the previous bot management solution had been blocking good bots, Ben and his team proceeded cautiously to make sure they would not have the same issue again. They took full advantage of DataDome’s 30-day free trial, and monitored how the software classified different categories of bots in the dashboard.

“The dashboard is very user-friendly and easy to find your way around,” Ben attests. “And indeed, we could see that the Google crawler was correctly identified, so we knew it would be able to get into our sites and index us successfully. The dashboard also confirmed that we had a lot of scrapers trying to extract prices from public endpoints.”

The Results: Fast Websites, Cost Savings, & Analytical Insights

While the main reason for replacing the previous bot management solution was to ensure trouble-free Googlebot indexation, Northland Properties also monitors that DataDome satisfies other criteria.

“The key point for us is to avoid any website performance issues when we get hit by attacks,” Ben notes. “So in addition to the DataDome dashboard, we’re also monitoring our AWS infrastructure to make sure that we aren’t seeing any extra load on our servers. When DataDome notifies us that there is an attack, we can see that all the bad bots are being blocked, but also that there are no spikes in CPU utilization or anything like that on any of our in situ instances. We don’t have any issues with unpredictable traffic peaks, poor website performance, or downtime anymore.”

Eliminating large volumes of unwanted bot traffic from Northland Properties’ websites also has the side benefit of substantially reducing IT and infrastructure costs.

“There are two aspects to the financial benefits we realize,” Ben observes. “When 40% of our traffic is being blocked, there are obviously direct infrastructure cost savings associated with that. But perhaps even more importantly, stopping bad bots helps us prevent revenue loss. The hospitality business is really competitive. If people come to our website and find it too slow, they will just leave us without a reservation. Making sure that our infrastructure is always available for our real guests is key for us.”

Finally, during the COVID pandemic, Ben has also been using the DataDome to gain new analytical insights. The dashboard’s Explore view makes it easy to filter human traffic as a separate segment, and Ben and his team have been using the function to monitor how human traffic patterns have changed as the pandemic unfolded.

In conclusion, Ben extends his thanks to the DataDome support team. “The team is extremely responsive; whenever we need anything, they immediately get to it. It’s been a great experience for us, and we’re very happy with DataDome,” he says.