Proxies for Web Scraping – Know Your Best Options

In today’s world, when cybercriminals, competitors, and government agencies keep an eye on everything you’re doing, it’s not wise and recommended to leave traces in the online world. Gladly, there is a way to make it happen. A proxy server is no less than a blessing when online privacy is at stake. It’s suggested for everyone, even if you’re involved in web scraping. Read the post to know what role proxies play in web scraping and why you should use one.

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Proxies for Web Scraping – Why You Need Them

Web scraping is the process of extracting freely available internet data. It is handy for market, academic, and other business-specific research. However, not every website permits the use of its website data. They use web scraper blocking technology to protect their data. The core of this web scraper blocking technology is finding the IP address.

With the help of an IP address, anyone can identify an internet user. Websites that don’t want their data to be shared will block the IP address and make the website inaccessible.

It is a huge hindrance to face when you’re scraping the internet at large. You will be disconnected repeatedly. Even if a website allows web scraping, it can limit the requests per source/device/user. You won’t be able to scrape the data after reaching a certain limit.

The next issue you might face while performing data scraping at large is that you won’t be able to scrape the data of certain locations. Some data is geo-restricted and won’t be easily available.

As a remedy, the proxy server divides your request among several proxies, making it appear as if it is coming from several different users instead of 1 particular user. As a result, the target sites will not alarm their limits.

If you don’t want these things to bother you, try using proxies for web scraping. The best proxies for web scraping can effortlessly hide the IP address and fail the IP blocking technology. When you connect with a proxy server, your actual IP address is replaced by a faux or proxy IP address. So, websites won’t be able to recognize your actual identity and block you.

If you’re using a proxy with multiple servers, you will have access to various IP addresses that will help you bypass the request limit. You can switch your IP addresses and prevent sending bulk scraping requests from a single IP address.

Proxies for web scraping are helpful in providing you with instant access to global data. You can connect to a proxy server situated at a different location and easily bypass the geo-restrictions.

For instance, if you’re in the UK and an Australian website isn’t available in your region, try using the best proxy for web scraping. You can connect with the Australia-based proxy server, get a local IP address, and easily access the geo-restricted website.

All in all, proxies for web scraping are here to make web scraping unrestricted, secure, and limitless.

The IP address-related articles may truly help:

• How to Hide My IP Address: All Ways Explained [2024]
• How to Get a Fake IP Mask Your Online Presence in 4 Easy Steps
• How To Change My IP and Why it’s a Must – The Secrets Are Out

Paid v/s Free Proxies for Web Scraping – Which One to Pick

Proxies are offered as open-source and paid services. From the above text, it’s clear that using a proxy is the easiest way to make your web scraping smoother than ever. But the real question here is whether to pick a free or a paid proxy for web scraping.

Even though free proxies for web scraping may sound tempting, we still suggest not going with them. With free proxies for web scraping, you can end up with data logging, poor speed, limited IP addresses, too many ads, and many other troubles.

On the contrary, you will have a great experience with paid proxies for web scraping. At peanuts’ cost, paid proxies will grant you great peace of mind. They will offer numerous IP addresses, great data privacy, fantastic speed, and added features. They even have customer care support to fix any issues and troubles you’re experiencing during their usage.

With all these benefits, paid proxies for web scraping are not easy to overlook.

What Types of Proxies Are Good for Web Scraping?

Proxies are of various kinds, and if you’re planning to use a proxy for web scraping, it’s imperative to find out which type of proxy is best for web scraping.

Datacenter proxies

Developed in a vast data center server, these proxies are cost-effective, can be purchased in bulk, and are easy to use. But are they suitable for web scraping? Well, we would say no, as web scrapers, built using proxy servers, are easy to detect. As they are often shared proxies, blocking possibilities are high with them.

Residential Proxies

These are the proxies attached to the IP address of a real household. They are sourced from real people and linked to an actual mobile device. As everything is genuine, there is less of a possibility of blocking. But, proxy providers have to make huge efforts to procure these proxies. Hence, quality is limited, and the cost is high.

Residential proxies are attached to a real device, making them perfect for bypassing bots or CAPTCHA. Web scrapers, built using residential proxies, feel more human than any other scraper.

With residential proxies, you can humanize scraping bots as they will have a valid and real-time IP address. With them, you don’t have to submit CAPTCHA again and again. This will make scraping swift.

Both shared and dedicated residential proxies are used for web scraping.

As the name suggests, dedicated proxies are exclusively used by you, ensuring a reliable and uninterrupted web scraping experience. In contrast, shared proxies, which are used by different users at different times, can be unreliable and may have IP addresses that are already blocked due to previous users’ activities. Therefore, opting for dedicated residential proxies is a confident move for uninterrupted web scraping.

ISP Proxies or Static Residential Proxies

ISP proxies are residential proxies created in data centers. Hence, their characteristics are a mix of both data center and residential proxies. They can be available in bulk and have stable connection speeds, so they are ideal for scraping search engines like Google, Bing, and many more.

Mobile Proxies or Static Residential Proxies

By default,  ISP residential proxies are rotational, allowing you to have a different address each time you unplug the modem. Those needing a uniform IP address can pick mobile proxies, also known as static residential proxies.

These are the proxies linked with an actual mobile device and remain constant. One can use such kinds of proxies for web scraping when scraping of specific pages is required.

What Is the Best Proxy for Web Scraping?

With a premium and feature-rich proxy, possibilities are endless, and businesses can become data-rich overnight. But, the proxy has to be the best in the class.

Now, one might think about what makes any proxy reliable. There are certain traits of a quality proxy provider. For instance:

• Privacy: It should provide private proxies as they prevent the use of the same  IP address by multiple users, further increasing blocking possibilities.
• Geo-arrangement: The proxy server location should be planned so that there is a proxy server in every leading location of the world. With diverse locations, it’s easy to access the internet of various countries without looking suspicious.
• Connection Type: The Connection type should be residential or mobile if you establish a P2P connection while scraping. However, only a few web scraping proxies manage to maintain this connection type. So, check out this before finding an ideal proxy for web scraping.
• Concurrency: You must check the concurrency or thread limit for the proxy provider. For seamless web scraping, it’s essential to make sure that the limit is not very small. With less concurrency limit, a web scraper will shut down early, which will not work for you. So, pick a service provider that offers a high concurrency limit.
• Quality of Service: Connect speed and stability should be excellent. Proxies with broken connection and sluggish speed, you won’t be able to scrape the web for long.

Considering all these points in mind, BrightData is an ideal choice to make. This best proxy for web scraping has multiple features and facilities that make web scraping speedy and continuous.

Its proxy server is wide enough to scrape web data across the globe. Its extensive IP address database proffers over 72 million residential IP addresses.

These residential IP addresses are rotational and attached to real devices. So, blocking possibility is very little.

Bright Data can perform scraping even at peak times and on a large scale. You can select proxies from different geolocations. The failure rate is significantly less as BrightData’s proxy has 99.99% uptime and is fully automated.

You have a data center, residential, ISP, and mobile proxies for web scraping to handle all your scraping needs. Let’s review each of them for web scraping.

Millions of Addresses to Choose From

BrightData lets you choose from over 72 million ethically sourced residential IP addresses and start scraping the web without a hassle with BrightData. With 99.99% uptime and an unlimited concurrent rate, it’s very unlikely you will experience restrictions and blocking as you scrape the internet.

It has the largest datacenter proxy network in the world, offering 770,000+ proxies. With excellent uptime, flexibility, and scaling capabilities, these proxies will instantly ensure you’re scraping bulk internet data.

Additionally, BrightData offers a huge proxy pool of ISP proxies that you can use for web scraping. There are over 700,000 legal ISP proxies to choose from. Because of the instant response and high uptime, you will have a better scraping experience with ISP proxies of BrightData.

It’s Global and Performant

BrightData’s residential proxy servers are present worldwide and are best known for offering IP addresses with consistent speed and performance.

As one can make unlimited customization and scaling, having an apt web scraping solution with BrightData is easy. You can bypass the geo-restrictions and scraper blocking from any location as IP addresses are rotating and the connection is entirely private.

This web scraping proxy provider supports two proxy types: shared and private. If you want to use BrightData’s shared residential IPs for web scraping, you need to know that IP addresses are free and you only pay for their usage.

Dedicated residential IPs for web scraping help scrape dedicated domains without any hassles and fear of being blocked, as you will have total control over the IP addresses.

Besides the above, BrightData is one of the best proxy providers to help you build a highly viable web scraper using its unstoppable datacenter proxies.

Its servers are in 98 countries, allowing you to scrape the web without bandwidth limitations. The proxies support city- and country-level geo-targeting and provide an extensive interface. The IPs are available across 3,000+ subnets.

This service provider’s ISP proxies are already collecting over 650TB of public data daily, and they can also help you.

Subscriptions and Customization

Along with performance, its subscription also needs a massive round of applause as it offers something for all kinds of needs. One can pay as proxies are consumed or pick from the pre-made yearly and monthly subscriptions.

As far as price is concerned, cost varies according to the plan picked. You can have a yearly or monthly subscription and enjoy web scraping with full customization capabilities.

Be stable while being mobile

If you’re searching for stable mobile proxies, try BrightData, as you get to enjoy a 3G/4G/5G mobile proxy network offering IP addresses with high uptime. With these proxies, you can target any country, city, carrier, and ASN.

Features of BrightData Proxies

BrightData offers a highly responsive web scraper to scrape websites. This best web-scraping tool provides a fully hosted IDE for seamless website scraping. A powerful proxy ecosystem backs the scraper and proffers excellent scraping capabilities.

BrightData can bypass the CAPTCHAs as one scrapes the data in large amounts. Its proxy infrastructure is robust enough to provide considerable flexibility and control.

Web scraping is fast with BrightData as it provides multiple no-code templates and JavaScript functions. These ready-to-use JavaScript functions help you scrape the web instantly.

Privacy is not compromised as BrightData is a GDPR and CCPA privacy-compliant tool that complies with all the leading data protection laws.

Try BrightData here >

How Do You Use a Proxy Scraper?

You don’t have to do anything extra to use a proxy scraper. If you manage to build an automated web scraper with an ideal proxy, you can enjoy automated scraping. To start with the proxy scraper, you need to build it from scratch or use pre-build resources.

BrightData offers a highly feature-rich web scraper IDE. With its pre-made scraping functions, you don’t have much to do. Use these JavaScript functions, and your proxy scraper will be ready in no time. It has debugging tools and an easy parser creation ability to make your scraping more impactful.

Once you’re ready with the proxy scraper, provide one or more URLs initially. The scraper will load the page’s HTML code related to that URL and start extracting the data from the page. Depending upon the capabilities of the scraper, one can also scraper the CSS and JavaScript elements of the targeted websites.

You can also define the data you want the proxy scraper to collect for you. As instructed, the scraper will collect all the data and will save it. You can access the data by downloading it in an Excel/CSV. Some even convert the data into JSON files that can be used as API. Use the accessed data as you wish or require.

Should You Use a Proxy Pool?

Best proxies are great for web scraping, provided you use them in bulk and scrape extensive data. Using a single proxy is not recommended as it will lead to resource and time wastage. With one IP address, scraping is slow, and not many geolocations are accessible. This is where we need a proxy pool.

A proxy pool is a collection of many proxies handling thousands of requests simultaneously. The proxy pool will have servers worldwide and various proxy types so that scraping is diverse and speedy.

Now, the question comes here is:

How big should the proxy pool be?

Well, the proxy pool size is decided according to the number of requests per hour, number of targeted websites, types of IPs, connection types, and IP rotation. Sort out all these factors and your respective requirements to decide the proxy pool size. The absence of a proxy pool and its effective management can lead to frequent blocking and sluggishness.

Those using BrightData proxies stand a chance to enjoy a fully managed proxy pool. It provides a fully integrated Proxy Manager that will help you gain full control of user access, manage white/blacklisting IPs, define the country-targeting rules, and many other features.

How to Set up Proxies on AWS for Web Scraping?

Setting up proxies on AWS for web scraping is easy as it supports proxy usage.

You can easily configure the HTTP_PROXY and HTTPS_PROXY environments. You have two ways to make it happen. You can DNS domain name. If you don’t have a DNS domain name, you can use the IP address.

In both cases, you must enter the colon, followed by a port name, to complete the command. The setup isn’t complete if you don’t authenticate the proxy. The default proxy authentication technique is HTTP Basic authentication.

You need to mention the username and password in the proxy URL. That’s it.

Why Must You Try Using Web Debugging Proxy for Web Scraping?

A web debugging proxy is a practical tool that simplifies HTTP requests and traffic logging. It intercepts and logs everything, from requests to HTTP headers. Its utility shines in app testing and is a top choice for extensive HTTP data scraping.

Final Say

Web scraping is necessary if you want to hold quality and dominant data. But, the process is not risk-free and easy. Geo-restrictions, request limits, and instant blocking are some of the key impediments. A proxy brings great relief by fixing all these issues in one shot. Try it today and improve your web scraping.

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