What are proxies and why do you need them when web scraping?

 

Before we discuss what a proxy is we first need to understand what an IP address is and how they work.

An IP address is a numerical address assigned to every device that connects to an Internet Protocol network like the internet, giving each device a unique identity. Most IP addresses look like this:

207.148.1.212

A proxy is a 3rd party server that enables you to route your request through their servers and use their IP address in the process. When using a proxy, the website you are making the request to no longer sees your IP address but the IP address of the proxy, giving you the ability to scrape the web anonymously if you choose.

Currently, the world is transitioning from IPv4 to a newer standard called IPv6. This newer version will allow for the creation of more IP addresses. However, in the proxy business IPv6 are still not a big thing so most IPs still use the IPv4 standard.

When scraping a website, we recommend that you use a 3rd party proxy and set your company name as the user agent so the website owner can contact you if your scraping is overburdening their servers or if they would like you to stop scraping the data displayed on their website.

There are a number of reasons why proxies are important for web scraping:

1.      Using a proxy (especially a pool of proxies - more on this later) allows you to crawl a website much more reliably. Significantly reducing the chances that your spider will get banned or blocked.

2.      Using a proxy enables you to make your request from a specific geographical region or device (mobile IPs for example) which enable you to see the specific content that the website displays for that given location or device. This is extremely valuable when scraping product data from online retailers.

3.      Using a proxy pool allows you to make a higher volume of requests to a target website without being banned.

4.      Using a proxy allows you to get around blanket IP bans some websites impose. Example: it is common for websites to block requests from AWS because there is a track record of some malicious actors overloading websites with large volumes of requests using AWS servers. 

5.      Using a proxies enables you to make unlimited concurrent sessions to the same or different websites.

 

Scraper site API is one of the best web scraping API that handles proxy rotation, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can scrape any page with a single API call. Web scraping made easy a powerful and free Chrome extension for scraping websites in your browser, automated in the cloud, or via API

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