Anyone who uses web scraping on a daily basis knows the importance of extracting data from chosen websites. Today’s businesses see this collected information as a necessary resource for success.

Although some website owners welcome scraping and even set up public APIs for easy collection, some companies actively protect their public data from automated extraction. Web scraping is not illegal, but it often violates the terms and conditions of a targeted page. If not done carefully, scraping can get your IP address banned.

Because businesses constantly engage in information to create advantages, everyone uses loopholes to protect automated scraping tasks. Read more if you want to scrape the web without getting blocked.

Use the best proxies for web scraping

Proxy networks are an indivisible part of web scraping. Because a scraper can never know the difficulties it will face, IPs from the best proxy providers (like this one, for example) act as a safety net for continuous data extraction.

Efficient scraping is impossible without proxies. Safely running concurrent connections at the same time is unachievable with a single IP address. We can get so much more from web scraping by choosing the right proxies. Let’s take a look at the best offers that suit the varying needs of automated data collection.

Datacenter vs residential proxies

Datacenter proxies hide your identity with IPs from data centers. These IPs are the cheapest option that provides good speed and internet anonymity. If your scraping goal is ethical and you discussed data extraction in advance with the website owner, datacenter proxies will get the job done. Proper management of such scrapers will help you create big scraping systems with concurrent connections.

How to create your own web server gp (3)

However, web scraping with datacenter proxies only works on websites that do not oppose the extraction of public data. These IPs are good for masking your network identity and location, but website owners can easily find and block them. Even the best proxy provider with an unlimited pool of IPs might not be enough for efficient web scraping. If you want automated data extraction without blocks, use a residential proxy.

Residential proxies are a better alternative for web scraping. This service is more expensive, but it offers hard to track IP addresses from internet service providers (ISP) all around the world. Get residential proxies and receive unlimited connections for your web scraping tasks.

Because residential proxies are harder to get and much more expensive, use them only if you really need them. Simple, regular scraping tasks on the same websites will not get you banned. However, if you seek public data from your competitors or other owners that do not want you scraping their website, residential proxies provide perfect protection. Rotating residential proxies choose different addresses from an IP pool with every connection and make your scraping tasks even more secure.

Avoid public proxies!

Free or public proxies might seem like a good choice for simple scraping operations, but it is dangerous. There is a reason why good services have a price – nobody is giving out free proxies without a cause. You might get lucky and use a below-average connection with an overused, most likely banned IP address.

Finding a reliable proxy provider creates a partnership that helps us squeeze the most out of received IPs to maximize our scraping efficiency. On the contrary, public proxies are run by unknown third parties that can steal your data and infect computers with malicious software.

Optimize your scraping bots

With residential proxies on your side, go ahead and start putting your web scraping bots to work. As we mentioned before, not every website likes to see web scrapers. That is because poorly optimized bots can send too many requests to the server which will slow it down.

Website owners use rate-limiting to stabilize their pages and prevent DDoS attacks. If you exceed that limit by scraping, your bot will be identified and most likely banned. A properly optimized web scraper lowers the rate of requests but still ensures efficient and automated data extraction.

In some cases, you might encounter websites with more advanced protection against web scrapers. Setting up HTTP request headers and real user agents will make your bots much harder to detect. Also, because we use scrapers to automate simple tasks, owners easily recognize inhuman behavior patterns. Adding random intervals between your requests helps to avoid detection and continue scraping the desired website. With good optimization, a web scraper is an ethical tool that outperforms humans at data collection without raising red flags to the owner.

An experienced scraper with the best proxy provider by their side has a much easier time collecting data. Use residential or datacenter proxies with optimized scrapers to have enough breathing room for mistakes. That is all you need to scrape the web efficiently without getting blocked.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published