Zyte Proxy: Smart rotating proxy for web scraping

idakballardp — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 02:35:58 +0000

Struggling with managing your proxies when Web Scraping? Try Zyte! The Zyte by developed by Scrapinghub.com

Let’s face it, managing your proxy pool is an absolute pain! Nothing annoys developers more than crawlers failing because their proxies are continuously getting banned.

Not only do you constantly find yourself firefighting proxy fires, the people who rely on this web data just get increasingly frustrated with you because of the unreliability of the data feed.

We were in the same boat for years, until we hit our breaking point and decided to solve this problem forever.

At the time, Scrapinghub was about 3 years in business, providing web scraping consultancy services to companies looking to outsource their data extraction.

Then along came this one project…

The client wanted us to build a web scraping infrastructure to scape product data from 20 e-commerce sites, about 1 million requests per day. Which at the time was a big deal!.

Everything started off great. We developed the spiders, done a number of pilot crawls and delivered the data to the customer.

However, we ran into serious problems scaling the crawls.

Although our spiders were well designed and configured to crawl at a polite speed, when we moved the project from proof of concept to production our proxies we being banned at an alarming rate.

Eventually, it got to the point that we couldn’t scale the crawl anymore as we couldn’t put out the proxy fires fast enough.

Initially, we told the client that we’d have the issue fixed in 1 or 2 days “as it was just a matter of swapping out the banned IPs”.

However, the days kept ticking by and we still hadn’t found a permanent solution.

Finally, nearly a month later. We fixed it!

The solution…

We stopped focusing on the underlying IPs and put all our energy into intelligently managing the IPs so that we could scrape reliably without the fear of being banned.

This breakthrough was a game-changer for us. With this new proxy management layer, we were able to scale our crawls nearly 100X and completely remove the headache of managing proxies.

This new proxy management layer would automatically select the best proxy to use for the target website and manage all the proxy rotation, throttling, blacklist, etc. ensuring that we could reliably extract the data we need.

All without any manual intervention from our engineers!

As we continued to scale, our customers increasingly were asking us how were we achieving such reliability with our proxies.

So in 2012, we decided to make this technology available to everyone in the form of Crawlera.

Zyte: The smartest rotating proxy for web scraping

Specially designed for web scraping, zyte allows you to crawl quickly and reliably, managing thousands of proxies internally, so you don’t have to. You never need to rotate a proxy again.

Since then zyte has undergone numerous redesigns and improvements to keep pace with the changes in web scraping technologies and cope with the ever more complex challenges experienced when scraping the web.

The Best Web Scraping API of 2021 - 2022

idakballardp — Sat, 13 Mar 2021 02:15:16 +0000

Web scraping APIs will help you evade anti-scraping techniques while getting access to the data you require. Come in now to discover the best web scraping APIs you can use for your web scraping projects.

What is a Web Scraping API?

Web Scraping APIs are web scraping service providers that help web scrapers avoid getting banned by circumventing anti-scraping techniques put in place by websites. They use techniques such as IP rotation, Captcha solving, and other in-house techniques to make sure the page you requested is downloaded for you. They simplify the whole process of web scraping as you only need to think of parsing the downloaded web pages.

Using a web scraping API is as simple as sending an API request. The pricing model of web scraper is based on successful requests. While some are priced based on some form credits and some on requests, you will only pay for successful requests, and as such, they always make sure they build their system to be reliable, efficient, and fast.

So, the Web Scraping API aim to handles Proxies, Headless Browsers, and CAPTCHAs for Building Web Scrapers.

In general, Web scraping API is more expensive than using a proxy pool managed by yourself.

Best Web Scraping APIs

There are many web scraping APIs in the market, with some of them providing their services for free. But we do not advise our users on this blog to use any of these free services except for their free trial options. Paid web scraping APIs are the best. Below are some of the best web scraping APIs that have been tested – and have proven to work.

ScrapingBee

Proxy Pool Size: Not disclosed
Supports Geotargeting: Yes
Cost: Starts at $29 for 250,000 API credits
Free Trials: 1,000 API calls
Special Functions: Handles headless browser for JavaScript rendering

ScrapingBee is one of the best web scraping API you can use if you do not want to deal with proxy management. However, ScrapingBee does much more than handling proxy rotation – the ScrapingBee API also handles headless browsers. This comes handy when you need to scrape websites that are Ajaxified or depend largely on JavaScript. The headless browser is used for rendering JavaScript. ScrapingBee makes use of the latest version of the Chrome browser in headless mode. It has a sizable number of IPs in its pool and has support for geotargeting. It has very friendly pricing, that’s affordable.

AutoExtract API

Proxy Pool Size: Undisclosed
Supports Geotargeting: yes, but limited
Cost: $60 per 100,000 requests
Free Trials: 10,000 requests within 14 days
Special Functions: Extract specific data from websites

The Automatic Data Extraction API, otherwise known as the AutoExtract API, is one of the arrays of web scraping products provided by Scrapinghub – the others being Scrapy, Scrapy Cloud, Crawlera, and Splash. AutoExtract API is one of the best and most specialized web scraping API you can get in the market right now. Unlike the others that will download the whole page for you and leave the work of parsing out the data to you, AutoExtract makes use of Artificial Intelligence to help you scrape the required data from web pages. It has support for scraping news and article data, e-commerce product data, job posting, and much more.

Scraper API

Proxy Pool Size: over 40 million
Supports Geotargeting: depend on the plan chosen
Cost: Starts at $29 for 250,000 API calls
Free Trials: 1,000 API calls
Special Functions: Solves Captcha and handles browsers

Scraper API is the web scraping API to you if your web scraper keeps getting blocked. With Scraper API, you will not only be undetectable but avoid any form of block. It is fully customizable, and you can modify your request headers and type, geolocation, and much more. When it comes to IP rotation, Scraper API has a pool of over 40 million IPs in its pool, which it uses for that. Just like the others on the list, Scraper API allows you to enjoy unlimited bandwidth and helps out with handling headless browsers. Also important is the fact that it has the capabilities of solving Captchas too.

Proxycrawl

Proxy Pool Size: Undisclosed
Supports Geotargeting: Yes, depending on the plan paid for
Cost: Starts at $29 for 50,000 credits
Free Trials: yes
Special Functions: Structured data output for specific e-commerce and social media sites

The Scraping APIs provided by Proxycrawl are a group of scrapers for specific sites such as Amazon, Google SERPs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Quora, and eBay, among other sites. Aside from the site-specific scrapers they have, they also have a generic scraper you can use to extract links, emails, images, and other content from a web page. Proxycrawl has got a pool of IP Address the route your requests through. Even without using their Scraper API, you can pay for a subscription just for their proxies. Their Scraping APIs are easy to setup and use.

Zenscrape

Proxy Pool Size: over 30 million
Supports Geotargeting: Yes, limited
Cost: Starts at $8.99 for 50,000 requests
Free Trials: 1,000 requests
Special Functions: handles headless Chrome

The Zenscrape scraping API is an easy to use API that returns a JSON object containing HTML markups of a page. When it comes to response speed, Zenscrape can be said to be super-fast. It provides a hassle-free method of extracting data from web pages without thinking of blocks and solving Captchas. Just like every other scraping API above, Zenscrape has the capability of rendering JavaScript and provide you 100 percent of what regular users of a page see. They have friendly pricing and even have a free plan. However, the free plan is quite limited and, as such, won’t be appropriate for you.

ScrapingANT

Proxy Pool Size: Undisclosed
Supports Geotargeting: Yes
Cost: Starts at $9 for 5,000 requests
Free Trials: yes
Special Functions: Avoid Captchas, renders JavaScript, customize browser settings

ScrapingANT is another web scraping API you can use for your web scraping jobs. It is very easy to use, and with it, you do not need to worry about handling headless browsers and JavaScript rendering. It also handles proxy rotation as well as output preprocessing. Other features of ScrapingANT includes support for custom cookies, Captchas avoiding, and some on-demand features such as browser customization. ScrapingANT can take over the heavy weight lifting from your end while you pay them for their service only when your requests are successful.

Scrapestack

Proxy Pool Size: over 35 million
Supports Geotargeting: Yes, over 100 locations
Cost: Starts at $19.99 for 200,000 requests
Free Trials: yes – 10,000 requests
Special Functions: Solves Captcha and renders JavaScript

With over 35 million residential and datacenter IPs in its pool, Zenscrape is ready to handle your requests at any scrape. It has a solid infrastructure that makes it very fast, reliable, and stable. It is one of the scraping APIs you can use if you do not want to deal with managing proxies – and doing it efficiently to avoiding the occurrence of blocks and Captchas. Scrapestack is trusted by over 2000 companies. Aside from handling proxies and Captchas, Zenscrape can also help you handle browsers for the sake of JavaScript, rendering, and simulating human actions.

Scrapingbot API

Proxy Pool Size: Undisclosed
Supports Geotargeting: Yes
Cost: Starts at $39 for 100,000 raw HTML download
Free Trials: yes
Special Functions: Parsing structured data from specific sites

Scrapingbot API might not be as popular as the ones discussed above, but it works quite great, and it is easy to use, and its users have gotten impressive reviews for it. It makes use of some of the latest techniques to make sure anti-scaping techniques are bypassed and required data scraped. Its pricing is affordable, and it renders JavaScript with support for popular JavaScript frameworks. It also hands headless browsers and takes care of proxies and its rotation to avoid the detection of their IP footprints. Aside from helping you to download full HTML of a page, it has support for parsing out structured data into JSON format for some sectors, including retail and real estate.

ProWebScraper

Proxy Pool Size: Undisclosed
Supports Geotargeting: yes, with limitations
Cost: Starts at $40 for 5,000 pages
Free Trials: yes
Special Functions: Solves Captcha and renders JavaScript

ProWebScraper has a scraping API that can help you scrape data from any web page without being blocked or forced to solve Captchas. Just like many of the scraping APIs discussed above, it downloads the whole web page for you, and you are to take care of the parsing phase yourself. ProWebScraper makes use of techniques such as IP rotation and other in-house techniques to make sure you are able to access the critical data for your business need. It is affordable, and you can even get a free trial to test the functionality of their service before making any commitment.

OpenGraph

Proxy Pool Size: Undisclosed
Supports Geotargeting: Yes, with limitation
Cost: Starts at $20 for 25,000 requests
Free Trials: yes – 100 requests

OpenGraph is one of the scraping API that can help convert a web page document into a JSON format. It is a very simple and lean scraping API that requires you to only send a restful API request, and the required data is returned to you as a response. It does not have many features as the other scraping APIs discussed above, but it gets the job done, and its pricing is actually one of the cheapest on the list.

Why Use a Web Scraping API?

With a web scraping API, the need for using proxies is eliminated. This is because it takes care of IP rotation and proxy management. Aside from these, web scraping APIs handle rendering of JavaScript by executing HTTP requests in headless browser environments such as headless Chrome, PhantomJS, etc. They also take care of preventing the occurrence of Captchas and solving them when they occur.

However, you need to know that web scraping APIs are more expensive than using proxies.

If a site does not have sophisticated anti-scraping systems, there is no need to make use of a web scraping API –proxies will suffix. If you can handle all the anti-scraping techniques put forward by websites, you can avoid incurring the cost using web scraping APIs.

Conclusion

If you have tried scraping a site with a sophisticated anti-spam system in place to prevent bots from accessing its content, you will know how difficult it is to evade blocks and Captchas.