Question

I’m trying to get a response (check if a URL exists) for a number of Amazon-hosted retail sites.

Using HttpWebRequest.GetResponse(), I can get a response from Amazon’s own site, however, I can’t for its hosted sites – specifically MarksAndSpencer.com. The response is always 503.

I’ve used an HTTP sniffer that always returns an answer so it does seem possible.

Answer 1

I evenetually figured out how to successfully make a request to Amazon and Amazon hosted sites.

Heres the snippet of code.

var request = (HttpWebRequest)HttpWebRequest.Create(uri);
request.Method = WebRequestMethods.GET;
request.UserAgent = HttpContextHelper.Current.Request.UserAgent;
request.Accept = "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8";