If you are not quite familiar with the concept of IP bans, you are lucky! But since you are reading this, the chances are that you experienced the frustration from interrupted scraping sessions on social media, search engines or e-commerce sites in the past. In this Guide we have put together some of the most frequent reasons for getting your access banned by the IP and set forth measures for overriding and avoiding such ‘traps’.
The Most Common Reasons for Blocking IP Addresses
An IP block signifies that a website you are trying to access denies the requests from your IP (Internet address) due to some violation of the site’s terms of use. It may happen for a bunch of reasons, like an excessive number of requests coming from your IP, or if the site decides that you are using it for gathering information without approval (while scraping, for instance).
A site could have a whole range of mechanisms for detecting the ‘abusive behavior’ from your side. This list includes but is not limited to anti-bot and anti-scraping tools to read your user agent, system fingerprints and abnormal behavior. Once such behavior is detected you will be, most likely, warned in the form of a Captcha and later suspended from using the site with your original IP.
How to Solve Problems with Blocked IP Addresses
So, you might be asking: how to get around and even how to evade an IP ban in the first place? Well, to significantly reduce your chances of getting blocked by the IP, you can resort to one or several of the following tools and techniques. We will list them here, with the first ones being the most radical and effective. The items below are more pertinent to commercial-scale information scraping than individual daily access to a website that can be secured with a VPN or MAC address alterations.
Choose Proxies for Avoiding IP Bans
Here, you will be choosing between residential proxies with the ability to imitate your physical presence in a certain geographical area, and datacenter proxies with high-speed performance for data-harvesting missions involving thousands of requests to the most prominent web platforms and search engines.
As you might already know, with a proxy you get a different IP to cloak your presence on a target site to complete data collection, registration, check-out or content posting.
Now, why proxies are number one on the list of the most effective tools for avoiding IP banning? The reasons are obvious. With a good private proxy, you are guaranteed to appear for a website under a different IP. Of course, there is always a risk of spotting irregular behavior by the site, but this risk can be alleviated by using special IP rotating mechanisms, for instance. With datacenter rotating proxies or residential rotating IPs, you can be sure that your mission will last for as long as required.
Follow the Rules of ROBOTS.txt
Although it may sound rather obvious and somewhat corny, you can learn a lot from this file. Robot.txt contains the information related to the rules of using bots while accessing the site. Scraping can be seen as a violation of the site’s use terms. So, the best approach would be to respect the conditions listed in Robots.txt while collecting data from this source.
The most common ways to follow the scraping rules would include organizing data collection during off-peak hours for the site (mind the geographical location here), setting delays between consecutive sessions and, of course, limiting the number of requests coming from a single IP. Here, you may hugely benefit from rotating IPs. But even if you use static residential proxies, you still can rotate them manually or using special tools like SwitchyOmega.
Change Your User Agent Frequently
A user agent is a part of your request that introduces your browser and operating system to the target. So, essentially, it is like your ID for the website and changing it would ensure additional uniqueness of your access request. If you keep changing your IP while leaving the user agent the same, the chances of getting your IP banned are rather high.
In order to change or rotate your user agent, developers normally use a script or manually alter it to go on with scraping under a new IP. In some cases, you can even resort to using a Googlebot user agent to make sure that you are welcome for parsing on any site. It is very unlikely that with such an agent, a website would be unwilling to cooperate with you. But again, all that is an extra measure that should increase your chances for success. There is no guarantee that an anti-scraping system on the other end is dormant and can be easily fooled.
Set Time Intervals Between Requests
We talked about it before, but here we would like to give you some tips on the time intervals to set between the requests under different IPs. Again, all of that is meant to avoid any pattern that will give away the use of a bot on your end.
In order to minimize the crawl-related issues, the intervals between your requests should be paced out in accordance with the requirements set forth by Robots.txt. In case there are no such requirements, proceed with at least 10 second intervals between each IP session.
Use Headless Browsers
Headless browsers are great tools for automating all sorts of data-related missions, from scraping to high-load testing. Such browsers do not have a GUI (Graphic User Interface) because they are meant for things that do not require opening and loading all the graphic elements of a website. Instead, they access a target site and can implement functions that require dynamically executable JavaScript. This alone is a feature that makes them irreplaceable for JS bots.
Having an extension like Puppeteer (for Google Chrome) or Selenium (for Firefox) lets you set up a scraping machine powered by proxies that will be both effective and reliable. And, you will save tons of hours in the process.
Now that we have covered some of the most common troubleshooting tips for avoiding IP bans, let’s come back to proxies and recap what we should look for in IPs to ensure maximum online scraping mission efficiency.
Why a Proxy is the Most Effective Tool to Bypass IP Blocking
I have three words for you here: Large Scale Projects. For anything more essential than a banned IP address on Hulu, you will most likely need a hefty pool of reliable proxies to pick from. And this will include most data scraping missions in e-commerce, recruiting, travel aggregation, you name it.
While a VPN can be good for solving an individual’s tasks. On a large scale, the cost will add up significantly. So building a scraping mission on it would become utopian. Plus, you have a wide variety of tools like headless browsers, extensions, scripts and bots that are meant to host private proxies on board.
And while you can definitely increase the efficiency of your disguised online presence with all the methods that we mentioned above, the cornerstone of any such operation will be a proxy. A residential or datacenter IP that will ensure flawless digital cloaking in the first place.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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What does an IP ban mean?
This type of ban signifies the denial of access to a target website from your machine. It is done by blocking you from the website based on your IP address.
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What can I do to prevent an IP ban?
If you want to avoid IP bans while scraping, you should power your scraping bots with high quality private proxies to complete your mission successfully. You can also employ a range of other things, like changing your user agent and using headless browsers, to name a few.
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Can you tell me how to bypass IP ban in Minecraft?
There are two ways that you can proceed: with a VPN service that can be good for a while and a reliable proxy server. We have a pool of gaming proxies that will be a perfect fit for Minecraft. Let our account manager know that you are looking for one via the chat-box below.
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What are the reasons for getting IP bans?
IP bans, most usually, occur when a target site identifies any violation of its terms of use by your presence. It can relate to excessive scraping activities or a highly frequent number of requests coming from your IP.
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How do I unblock my IP address on a website?
If you failed to get it unblocked through talking to the site’s customer support, the fastest way would be by having a new IP. You can do it by buying a proxy server that will hide your original IP behind a new one that will grant you access to the website.
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Do you know how to get un-ip-banned on Snapchat?
Unfortunately, some IP bans on Snapchat are permanent. For resolving this issue, you will need a fresh IP from a trusted provider. We suggest getting a Snapchat compatible proxy from our pool to regain access to the platform.
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