Nowadays, digital marketing and overall work of IT related companies in one form or another addresses the use of web scraping. Companies tend to use scraping technologies for analyzing markets, GSA (search engine ranking) and other marketing research tasks. However, your scraping activity can easily be tracked and blocked if you are not using special tools that can protect you. The main tool in this category is proxy server, and in this text we will talk about what to look for when picking a proxy for scraping software.
Choose a Proxy for Web Scraping
When you start looking at the proxy option on the market, the first thing you should think about is what tasks you are going to solve with proxies. When looking for a solution for web scraping with Ruby or other data collection tasks, you should look at what a provider can offer you in this specific field. For example, look into what technical documentation or level of support you can get out of it.
If you are going to use your own scraper with, for example, middleware, that will need another set of tools. So, ultimately, you need to go into details of your use case specifically and find the provider capable of meeting all of your needs. In this manner, some of the providers can let you use various extensions, whitelisted IPs or different kinds of proxies, like datacenter or static residential proxy. This, in turn, can be used in many use cases and spheres of web scraping. For example, job posting sites like LinkedIn, sites like Zillow, or general social media platforms like Reddit and Twitter. It is also a good practice to double-check which locations you are planning to use in your scraping project. After this, you can compare your list with locations the provider offers. Some projects may focus only on the US or Europe, and others will cover lots of countries or websites.
The next thing you need to investigate is the level of technical support. Learn what kind of technical support provider is willing to give you and check if it meets your expectations.
Criteria for the Best Proxy Service
In this light, the first thing you will be looking at is the amount of unabused addresses that provider can give you. This is crucial criteria for any of the data aggregation work; otherwise, you can be blocked or face other obstacles. In ideal circumstances, your proxy provider will have anonymous proxies that will look like a new legitimate IP or other tools like datacenter rotating proxy to escape being blocked. This is especially important when launching a large-scale scraping project that is targeted, for example, at the search engines like DuckDuckGo and Bing or even Google.
The next thing you should check is the possibility of data scrape and scraping with different tools, like scrape Bing SERP. Many countries give you access to the content only from the local IP address. So you should find a provider that will give you access to a big number of countries at the same time. Some of the providers might make it hard to select the exact location, so you need to double-check it too. For example, if you are planning on scraping major e-retail chains like Amazon, eBay, BestBuy, or Shopee, choosing the right location based on your tasks will be crucial to getting clear results with the right representation.
The next topic to look at when choosing proxies for web scraping is the possibility of setting software proxy for scraping in different environments and for different use cases. For example, if you want to use residential and datacenter proxy at the same time for different tasks. In this light, the provider of your choice needs to have quality technical support on all the stages of your work. Also, it can be helpful, if the provider has ready-made instructions for the basic proxy setup for popular use cases.
Why You Do Not Need Proxy Lists for Scraping
In the past, scraping data to Excel or other scraping work required you to use an actual list of proxies to go through. Today, you can use backconnect network for your proxy setup. It can automatically track several parameters and supply you with a stable connection at all times to stay legal while scraping.
It looks even more reasonable when your proxy lists can contain millions of lines with different values. Most of the modern web scrapers that need a proxy list can use rotating connections and API for managing this work. For example, to work in Scrapy. It is also possible to integrate rotation in this tool.
The Best Proxies for Web Scraping in 2023
Here is the list of the most popular options in the proxy providers market at the time. All of these providers prove their efficiency and any of them can be your choice, but let’s compare them in more detail to find all the pros and cons.
PrivateProxy
Privateproxy.me is a long-time market participant and now stands as the reliable provider of one of the best proxies for web scraping pools, with servers all around the World. You can find a rich pool of IPs in all the popular and wanted locations in America, China, Europe and the UK. But besides that, you can always count on the famous customer support, ready to solve any of your technical issues.
Main advantages:
- Large pool of high quality datacenter and residential proxy sets.
- Great choice of location in all of the most popular countries across the globe.
- User-friendly UI and outstanding technical support
Smartproxy
Smartproxy can provide you with a large network of proxies for data harvesting. You can select the location from almost all of the popular places and sites, so you can target your scraping and parsing errors precisely. Plus, you can rely on the customer support service.
Main advantages:
- Fairly large networks of servers in different countries around the world.
- Powerful solutions for all the main scraping tasks.
- Guides for web scraping proxy configuration.
Oxylabs
Oxylabs proxies are a good option for gathering local data in various places because of a large global pool of IPs. Oxylabs is primarily focusing on work with businesses, so you can expect the high level of support and overall quality of proxies.
Main advantages:
- Big pool of proxies available to all the popular locations globally.
- Good performance and high results in fault tolerance of proxies.
- Rich documentation for setting up proxies manually.
Bright Data
Bright Data can give you access to a fairly big network of premium proxies for the prices slightly higher than average. Plus, for some of the use cases, you are forced to have advanced knowledge proxy utilization.
Main advantages:
- Big list of accessible residential IPs.
- Rich choice of server locations.
- Wide possibilities for customization and advanced proxy use.
Infatica
Infatica can provide you with regular residential proxies that will be suitable for most of the data collecting tasks. They can process big loads and have no limits for connections.
Main advantages:
- Big variety of stable proxy servers to choose.
- Affordable pricing points.
- Wide range of locations.
Rayobyte
With Rayobyte you can access proxy servers in more than 150 countries across the world. More than this, you can target your scraping tasks up to the city level for the best results. Also, you can count on the non-expiring traffic.
Main advantages:
- Access to the servers in 150 countries.
- Guaranteed non-expiring traffic.
- Competitive pricing points.
IPRoyal
IPRoyal proxies can be one of the cheapest choices for you, depending on the plan. But, on the other hand, the provider can’t give that rich proxy pool or list of features. This can be a good decision if you are looking into solving small and simple web scraping tasks.
Main advantages:
- Reasonable pricing policy.
- Simple setup process.
Webshare
Webshare can provide you with the base of approximately 30 million residential IPs. You also can expect to get a full self-service with wide customization options. This can make some troubles for newbies, but more advanced users can enjoy the free space for customization.
Main advantages:
- Rich pool of proxies and IPs to choose from.
- High class of customizability.
Frequently Asked Questions
Please read our Documentation if you have questions that are not listed below.
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Why do web scrapers need to use proxies?
Web scraping tasks are not always encouraged by sites and in some cases lots of requests from one device may lead to block. With proxies, you can change your IP and evade being blocked while collecting data.
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What proxies are the best for web scraping tasks?
This highly depends on your exact scenario. In most cases, residential proxies can be a good choice for simple data collecting.
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What to pay attention to when choosing a proxy provider?
You need to check the amount of unabused IPs that the provider can give, locations of the servers and overall quality of the service.
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