Black Friday is pretty much a tat sale now.
If an organised and sustained effort to browse heavily some website took place, would it be enough to cause increased website costs for the company?
The big sites planning their year on selling masses of junk on one weekend no doubt expect their systems to scale up accordingly, and they plan for that cost.
How much browsing, by how many more people browsing and not buying, would be needed to cause them significant costs?
Possible?
So many companies don’t value their customers, their data or value.
It is time to change that, but how?
Without some proper security issue to take advantage of such as a very intense custom search and automating it with a script to spam it while cycling IP addresses you’ll not get anywhere.
A single person doing something expected continuously is unlikely to be able to spend $1 of capacity at pretty much any website.
If you want to make a dent you need to aim for around 100k small requests a second that actually hit the database and not just cache.
The issue is that if you want something they can’t cache you have to be logged in, but if you’re logged in you can be blocked. You could target small/medium businesses but that’s probably not the ones you’re after.
The one exception to this is CC validity checks. You can generate random card numbers, expiry dates, and security codes that pass the computational checks unherent to those numbers for all credit cards. Then the CC company charges like $0.03 per lookup or something. I’ve seen it used against scammers who don’t know what they’re doing where you spam thousands of tries per second until they shut the site down.