Well come on, it’s a little complex to answer that, it’ll all really depend on what your SaaS "look", counting traffic is quite different from counting views.
Imagine that your Saas only looks at traffic, this type of control is done by monitoring the port of the Switch Layer 3 in which the service runs, if it is something virtualized each store can be separated by Vlans, everything that travels on the/vlan port is added up (upload/download)at the end of the month the guy has his independent upload and download traffic, I doubt they have a Sniffer behind taking from the sum which ips are known robots, this would be a brutal and unworkable job (and if the IP or class of one of the robots change?)therefore I doubt that someone cashes from traffic collecting information robots.
Well imagine now that Saas looks at the amount of visits, the only way I know how to account for this is by analyzing the access logs of the http server, depending on the verbose of the log has a lot of information of who connected (IP, Agent, Version of the OS, etc)once again your Saas would have to know which of these visitors are robots, discount agents that are not considered users. Is it possible? Yes it is possible to delete the known ones! google for example provides information on how a bot’s accesses would appear in your logs see here.
The question is whether these companies care about gathering information and patterns from bots. in my opinion this is not done.
Imagine that Mr José develops in his house a robot that connects to his online shop and compare the price of an electric shaver with other shops? And then you think your Saas would have enough tricks to identify it? both by traffic and by access this connection would pass peacefully as a user, but if the robot of the Lord Joseph send information of agents and OS exactly as if it were of a real user (if it would pass for what you called genuine navigation by browser), and worse imagine that this robot makes throughout the day 30 accesses, how to know if really was not a user clicking F5 waiting for a lightning promotion in your store.
The right way is to question directly where your services run, they may say they do not count but even so I doubt rsrs.
You’re talking about the traffic on the host provider?
– KaduAmaral
@Kaduamaral, no, traffic consumed by each account in a Saas system. Example the guy has a virtual store, and at each view of a page, is accounted for pageviews, visits or traffic, for charging, my question is, if the traffic of the search robots enters in the accounting, and the same will consume bandwidth from my server.
– Williams
The cost generated by search engines are usually quite low. I think the question you should ask is: How much will be charged in a Ddos? As thousands of useless hits to your site can burn your entire budget quickly.
– Marcos Zolnowski