DEV Community: Peter Hansen

Is Web Scraping Legal?

Peter Hansen — Tue, 12 Jul 2022 09:14:47 +0000

This post is inspired by an article originally posted here.

Web scraping is the process of extracting data from websites. It can be used to collect information such as prices, contact details, or even entire articles. While it can be a useful tool, there are some legal considerations to keep in mind before you start scraping away.

There are some arguments concerning the legality of web scraping, but they often depend on who is making the argument and what incentives they have.

It really depends on the situation and definition. Here, we define web scraping simply as the process of collecting data from across the internet. Gathering data from other websites is a useful and essential part of many legitimate data analysis operations. Web data scraping itself isn’t illegal, but it can be illegal or in a grey area depending on these three things:

1. The type of data you are scraping
2. How do you plan to use the scraped data
3. How you extracted the data from the website

What Types of Data Are Illegal To Scrape?

There are a few types of data that you should never scrape without the explicit permission of the owner. This includes but is not limited to:

1. Personal data - This includes things like:

Name
Email
Phone Number
Address
User Name
IP Address
Date of Birth
Employment Info
Bank or Credit Card Info
Medical Data
Biometric Data

Scraping this type of data without permission could result in identity theft or other types of fraud.

2. Copyrighted data - This generally applies to the following types of web data:

Articles
Videos
Pictures
Stories
Music
Databases

Is Web Scraping Itself Illegal?

The simple answer to this question is: no, web scraping is not illegal. However, there are some gray areas when it comes to web scraping and the law. The main issue has to do with how you use the data that you scrape. If you use the data for personal or commercial purposes, you should be fine. However, if you use the data in a way that violates the terms of service of the website you're scraping, you could be violating the law.

What type of information is legal to scrape?

Am I scraping personal data?
Am I scraping copyrighted data?
Am I scraping data from behind a login?

If your answer to all three of the above questions is “No”, then your web scraping is legal.

The 10 Best Free Proxies for Web Scraping in 2022

Peter Hansen — Sat, 09 Jul 2022 07:42:22 +0000

If you're looking to scrape web data, you'll need a proxy. A proxy is a server that acts as an intermediary between your computer and the internet. This means that when you request data from a website, the proxy will send the request on your behalf and then return the response to you.

There are many free proxies available, but not all of them are created equal. In this article, we'll show you the 10 best free proxies for web scraping so that you can get the data you need without spending a fortune.

TLDR - If you don't want to read the full article - you can immediately see the list with the free proxy providers.

What is a Proxy?

A proxy is a server that acts as an intermediary between your computer and the internet. When you connect to the internet through a proxy, your online activities are hidden from your ISP and other third parties. Proxies are often used for web scraping because they can help to bypass restrictions placed on websites.

There are two main types of proxies: public proxies and private proxies. Public proxies can be used by anyone and are usually free to use. Private proxies are only accessible by authorized users and typically come with a fee.

A detailed comparison of different types of proxies can be found here.

Why use proxies for web scraping?

There are several reasons why you might want to use proxies for web scraping. First of all, proxies can help to hide your IP address. This is important because your IP address can be used to track your location and identity.

Another reason to use proxies for web scraping is that they allow avoid getting blocked when web scraping. If a website has blocked your IP address, you will not be able to access the site. However, if you use a proxy, you will be able to route your traffic through a different IP address, which will allow you to bypass the block.

Proxies can also help you to speed up your web scraping process. By routing your traffic through multiple proxies, you can make requests from multiple IP addresses at the same time. This can help you to scrape data more quickly.

Every HTTP request can go through a random proxy server or you can choose a proxy server with specific geolocation, for example, you can pretend that you are from Germany by using only german proxy servers.

Which proxy provider to use?

There are many free proxy providers available on the internet, but not all of them are equally good. Some free proxy providers may sell your data to third parties, or they may not provide a reliable service.

When choosing a free proxy provider, it is important to consider their reputation and reviews from other users. It is also a good idea to make sure that the provider does not sell your data to third parties. A good proxy provider will also offer reliable service with little or no downtime.

But not all free proxy lists are equally great, that is why we have created this hand-picked list of the top 10 free proxies and the best free proxy lists for web scraping.

List of free proxy providers

Each of these providers offers a different set of features, so it is important to choose one that best suits your needs. For example, some proxy providers offer more anonymity than others. Some also offer more IP addresses than others.

When choosing a free proxy provider, it is important to consider your specific needs. If you need a high degree of anonymity, for example, you will want to choose a provider that offers a large number of IP addresses and provides robust security features.

1. ScraperAPI

Website: https://www.scraperapi.com

ScraperAPI is a paid premier proxy provider that also offers 5,000 API requests for free every month.

This proxy scraper tool is at the top of the list among other providers since, in contrast to others, it offers free proxies only after a brief signup process. What makes this good?

Free proxy lists, on the other hand, just leave proxy addresses exposed for anybody to take, which can quickly result in IP abuse and bans.

With ScraperAPI, free users may access high-quality IPs in the same way as premium users without having to deal with the open-ended nature of most free proxy lists.

The free plan includes five simultaneous requests and multiple IP addresses.

Additionally, unlike the majority of other free providers, they give 24/7 help to address queries about utilizing their proxies for web scraping or other purposes.

2. Spys.one

Website: http://spys.one/en

Although many nations only have a small number of addresses coming from their locations, Spys.one is a proxy list database with IPs from 171 different nations. Each of the top three countries on the list—Brazil, Germany, and the United States—offers more than 800 proxies, and hundreds more are available from any other nation you can think of.

To help customers focus their search for free proxies, the HTTP proxy list has been divided into subcategories with sorting options such anonymous free proxies, HTTPS/SSL proxy, SOCKS proxy, HTTP, and transparent.

There are ratings for each address for latency, speed, and uptime. As can be expected, the majority of proxies are slow and have high latency, with an average uptime of about 70%. Free proxies are also listed with a "check date," which indicates the most recent time the status of the proxy was reviewed.

About one-fourth of all proxies have been checked in the past 24 hours, another one-fourth in the past week, and the remaining one-half have been examined more than a week ago.

Some of the less well-known nations haven't been checked in more than a month and are probably dead.

3. Open Proxy Space

Website: https://openproxy.space/list

Three different sorts of batches—SOCKS4, SOCKS5, and HTTP/S—of free proxy lists are offered by Open Proxy Space. Each batch is assigned a label based on the time it was formed, and each list only contains active proxies at that time.

The time the lists were formed is indicated by a tag, such as "3 hours ago," "1 day ago," "2 days ago," etc. Users can look through lists that were made months ago, however the older the list, the more dead proxies it will have, and fresh batches will already have the active proxies from those older lists.

Once a list has been chosen, users can select one or more nations to include or omit from the list before exporting the IPs as text data. Freeloaders have fewer sorting options than paid premium members, who have access to unique API scripts, ports, and other features.

4. Free Proxy

Website: http://free-proxy.cz/en

Free Proxy has a design straight out of Bel-Air, and its list of more than 17 000 free proxies is simple to explore and sort. Users can choose between many protocols, including HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4, and SOCKS5, as well as between elite and transparent levels of anonymity.

Most of the other providers on this list lack certain unique options that this one does. A page with three distinct lists—proxies by port, proxies by region, and proxies by city—opens when the "Proxies by category" option at the bottom is chosen.

In essence, a user can choose a free proxy from a list of proxy servers organized by country and even individual towns around the globe. This would ideally be used to simulate a certain location or to test content access depending on a world region.

Although these sub-lists are alphabetized, there is no other way to arrange them.

5. ProxyScrape

Website: https://proxyscrape.com/free-proxy-list

With simple sorting options like country, anonymity, and SSL, ProxyScrape includes your standard-fare list of free proxies.

Using two-character country codes instead of the complete country name or even a far more comprehensible three-character country code when sorting by a nation can be a little perplexing.

A "timeout" slider that enables users to restrict proxy results to those that reach or surpass a specific timeout threshold, measured in milliseconds, is one noteworthy feature.

They provide a premium service with changing proxies and other cutting-edge features, similar to a few other companies on this list.

ProxyScrape, on the other hand, doesn't offer a free trial, so customers will have to pay for those advantages, which negates the whole point of acquiring free proxies in the first place.

People with a higher sense of altruism might be interesting to discover that ProxyScrape donates to a number of organizations, including Teamtrees and the Animal Welfare Institute, though it is unclear how one could contribute by making use of their free proxies.

6. Free Proxy Lists

Website: http://www.freeproxylists.net

Of all the free proxy server providers we've researched, Free Proxy Lists features one of the most straightforward and user-friendly design.

Those looking for SOCKS proxies must look in another drawer because it only has HTML and HTMLS proxies. Search criteria such as ports, levels of anonymity, and nation can be specified. The free proxy list can also be filtered by city or region, however, doing so requires clicking through up to 38 pages of proxies in order to locate the appropriate city or region. This is the single significant flaw in an otherwise straightforward list.

The response and transfer levels for each address are shown in two color-coded bar graphs next to it, but there is no numerical information provided to explain what each level signifies, thus it is only useful as a general comparison to other proxies listed side by side. Fortunately, uptime is expressed as a percentage.

7. SSL Proxy

Website: https://www.sslproxies.org

"SSL (HTTPS) proxies that are just checked and updated every 10 minutes," reads the tagline for SSL Proxy. Although all of the proxies on the list have been tested within the last hour, this is not actually the case.

The free proxies come from different nations around the world, however, there are only 100 proxies on the list, which limits their availability. Users may, as predicted, sort by country, this time including both the two-character country code and the full name, as well as anonymous choices, with almost every proxy on the list being designated as either anonymous or elite.

There is also a field marked "Google," which probably refers to Google accepting the proxy or perhaps a proxy coming from a Google source.

We were unable to test SSL Proxy's functionality because all of the addresses showed "Google" as "no" when we checked it. This list solely includes HTTPS proxies, as implied by the name, with HTTP and SOCKS proxies available for a fee.

8. GatherProxy

Website: http://www.gatherproxy.com

Like almost all of the other proxy sources we've looked at, GatherProxy provides a listing of free proxy IP addresses. These proxies are sorted in a little novel and enlivening manner. A list of the 50 proxies that were most recently tested is displayed on the site, together with information on each proxy's update date, country of origin, level of anonymity, uptime, and response times.

There is a field for "city" information, but it is empty. Although the proxies are not updated this frequently, the page automatically refreshes every 30 seconds or so. Although it's doubtful that most of the free proxies will stop operating in such a short amount of time, the addresses at the top of the list frequently display an update time from more than 5 minutes ago.

GatherProxy presents uptime data as a ratio rather than as a percentage or bar graph, with "L" denoting "live" and "D" denoting "down" on the left and right, respectively. The collection of tabs at the top of the screen, which includes tabs for proxy by country, proxy by port, anonymous proxy, web proxy, and socks list, is the most useful feature, though.

The user is directed to a sub-page with links to filter the proxies based on criteria after choosing one of these alternatives. The ability to select from a pool of specific proxies is perfect because there is even a count stated for each nation and port. Half of the 11,000 proxies in their database had been verified as active in the previous 24 hours. Additionally, they provide free site scraping and proxy checking tools along with instructional videos.

9. Proxy-List

Website: https://www.proxy-list.download

Over 5,000 free proxies are available on Proxy-List, which is updated every two hours.

Proxy-List has the same standard sorting options as the other free proxy providers, with the primary listings divided into four categories: HTTP, HTTPS, SOCKS4, and SOCKS5.

One useful feature is the option to export proxy lists as text files or, with the click of a button, copy the information to the clipboard. They provide a Chrome plugin for web scraping and API access to the proxy list, which the most of serious web scrapers presumably already have but it might still be worthwhile to test out.

10. Proxy Nova

Website: https://www.proxynova.com/proxy-server-list

Additionally, Proxy Nova offers a list of free proxies that places the most recently checked addresses at the top. Visitors to this website must manually refresh the page, unlike GatherProxy, which is something we kind of like. Finding a superb free proxy IP address only to have it vanish because the page auto-refreshed and you have no easy way to get it again is one of the most aggravating experiences. In our experience, proxies at the top of the list were never more than a minute old. The proxies do keep quite up-to-date. Additionally given are their locations, uptimes, and speeds. One odd field on the proxy table just states "YouTube," yet it was empty for every proxy listed. There are no ways to determine the size of the pool of free proxy IP addresses, and the only sorting choices are by country and anonymity.

Most of us have heard the adage "you get what you pay for" throughout our lives, but with free proxies, this is only generally accurate. As you can see, there are some reputable suppliers selling active proxies for free or, at most, a small amount of ad money from users visiting their websites. Buying proxies for nothing should yield a list of entirely dead addresses. Top-tier proxy providers do provide premium packages for access to their private proxy lists, but a few of them also give away free API calls or free trials. Any proxy obtained from a free list comes with the highest warning about longevity. Free proxies will inevitably come and go, necessitating the daily updating of web scrapers' lists of proxies. Furthermore, even freely available proxies that have been verified to be active may be disabled by ISPs and websites, causing users who paid nothing for those proxies to feel ripped off.

![10 free proxy providers](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/jergo2d6fvcmb6scg3mw.png)

7 ways to avoid getting blocked or blacklisted when Web scraping

Peter Hansen — Sat, 18 Jun 2022 22:09:05 +0000

How to Avoid Getting Blocked or Blacklisted when web scraping

If you're doing a lot of web scraping, you might eventually get blocked. This is because some websites don't want to be scraped, and will take steps to prevent it. However there a list of technics you can use in order to avoid getting blocked or blacklisted by the website you're scraping. There are a few things you can do to avoid this:

Use tools/proxy servers for rotating IP. There are many web scraping tools available, both free and paid.
Don't scrape too aggressively. If you make too many requests to a website too quickly, you're likely to get blocked. Space out your requests so that they don't look like they're coming from a bot, and make sure to obey any rate limits that the website has in place.
Scrape responsibly.

By following these tips, you can avoid getting blocked or blacklisted when web scraping. Let's have a look at these tips with more details.

1. IP Rotation

If you're serious about web scraping, then you need to be using IP rotation. This is because most websites will block IP addresses that make too many requests in a short period of time. By using IP rotation, you can keep your scraping activities under the radar and avoid getting blocked or blacklisted.

There are a few different ways to rotate IP addresses. One way is to use a proxy server. A proxy server is basically a middleman that routes your requests through a different IP address. This means that the website you're scraping will only see the proxy server's IP address, not your IP address.

See a video explaining how proxy server works:

Using proxy servers has several benefits. First, it makes it much harder for websites to track and block your activity. Second, it allows you to make more requests in a shorter period of time, since each proxy can have its own IP address. And third, it allows you to rotate your IP address quickly and easily, which is important for avoiding detection and getting blocked.

Another way to rotate IP addresses is to use a VPN. A VPN encrypts all of your traffic and routes it through a different IP address. This is a bit more secure than using a proxy server, but it can be slower since your traffic has to be encrypted and decrypted. While this is a good and reliable solution, there are not many vendors on the market today offering easy-to-use and affordable solutions.

Finally, you can also use a service that provides rotating IP addresses. These services usually have a pool of IP addresses that they rotate between users. This is the easiest way to use IP rotation, you simply need to include proxy service provider into your request URL, something like this.

Your target website is: https://www.amazon.com

Instead of sending your request directly to the target you will send it through proxy service for example:

request({
    method: 'GET',
    url: 'https://proxybot.io?url=https://www.amazon.com'
}, (err, res, body) => {

In this case every request will go though a random server. The target will have no idea that all the requests are coming from you because there is no connection between them.

List of popular proxy providers can be found here.

2. Set a User-Agent header

A User-Agent is a piece of information a special type of HTTP header that tells a website what kind of browser you are using. By setting a real user agent, you will be less likely to get blocked or blacklisted because the website will think you are a regular person browsing the internet with a normal browser.

Some websites might block requests from User Agents that don’t belong to a major browser. Setting User Agents for web crawlers is important because most websites want to be on Google and allow Googlebot through. Setting the User-Agent header will definitely lead to more success when web scraping.

The user agent should be up to date with every update because it changes per browser update, especially Google Chrome. List of popular User agents can be found here.

3. Set Other HTTP Request Headers

In order to make web scraping less conspicuous, you can set other request headers. The idea is to mimic the web browser's headers used by real users this will make your scraper look like a regular website visitor. The most important headers are Accept, Accept-Encoding, and Upgrade-Insecure-Requests, which will make your requests look like they are coming from a genuine browsing device rather than a robot.

Read full guide about how to use Headers for web scraping.

Some websites may also allow you to set a Referrer header so that it appears as though you found their site through another website.

For example, the headers from the latest Google Chrome is:

“Accept”: “text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,

image/apng,*/*;q=0.8,application/signed-exchange;v=b3″,

“Accept-Encoding”: “gzip”,

“Accept-Language”: “en-US,en;q=0.9,es;q=0.8”,

“Upgrade-Insecure-Requests”: “1”,

“User-Agent”: “Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_12_6) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/76.0.3809.132 Safari/537.36”

4. Randomize time In Between Your Requests

If you are web scraping, you might be making requests at a rapid pace which can get you blocked or blacklisted. To avoid this, you can set random intervals in between your requests. This will make it less likely for you to get blocked or blacklisted.

Pro tip: A website might have a robots.txt file which will allow you to know the exact delay that you should use in between your requests in order to avoid crashing their site with heavy server traffic.

5. Set a Referrer

When you are web scraping, it is important to set a referrer so that you do not get blocked or blacklisted. A referrer is the URL of the page that you are coming from. To set a referrer, you can use the following code:

var referrer = "http://example.com";

This will set the referrer to http://example.com. You can also use a wildcard to set the referrer to all pages on a domain:

var referer = "*://*.example.com";

This will set the referrer for all pages on example.com.

6. Use a Headless Browser

Some websites can be tricky to scrape because they will check for tiny details browser cookies, web fonts, extensions and javascript execution in order to determine whether or not the request is coming from a real user.

If you're planning to do any serious web scraping, you'll need to use a headless browser. A headless browser is a web browser without a graphical user interface (GUI). Headless browsers provide a way to programmatically interact with web pages, and are used in many applications, including web scraping.

There are many advantages to using a headless browser for web scraping. First, headless browsers are much less likely to be detected and blocked by websites. This is because they don't send the same kind of "user-agent" information that regular browsers do. User-agent information can be used to identify and block certain kinds of activity, so by hiding this information, headless browsers are much more stealthy.

Another advantage of using a headless browser is that they can render Javascript, which is important for many modern websites. Many website features are powered by Javascript, and if you want to scrape data from these kinds of sites, you'll need a browser that can execute Javascript code. Headless browsers can do this, whereas traditional web scraping tools often can't.

I have a guide explaining how to scrape data from a website built with a javascript framework.

If you're doing any serious web scraping, using a headless browser is essential. Headless browsers are more stealthy and can render Javascript, which traditional web scraping tools often can't.

7. Avoid hidden traps

You can avoid being blocked by webmasters by checking for invisible links. Some websites detect web crawlers by putting in invisible links that only a robot would follow. If you scrape a website and find these, then avoid following them. Usually this type of link will contain “display: none” or “visibility: hidden” attributes. You may want to also check for color-related invisibility including the color set on the link, as this is another way of hiding a link. For example color of a link can be set to the same color as background, for example color: #fff;

Top 7 Residential Proxy Providers

Peter Hansen — Thu, 21 May 2020 14:27:29 +0000

Top 7 Residential proxy providers

I'm building web scrapers. It happens that very often I need to use proxies for my work. Proxies help to avoid/bypass various problems you might encounter when web scraping. The biggest benefit proxies are giving you is obviously - anonymity.

Some service gives you a lot of power, but also require some setup and they are generally more expensive. If you are a beginner, there are also services that very easy to use. You don’t have to do any setup - you simply call an API endpoint and your request will be sent through a random proxy.

I have tried and tested different residential proxy providers and created a list containing my favorite services. Below you can find a list with the best top 7 residential proxy providers.

Best Residential Proxy Providers

Residential proxies allow you to conceal your IP address by cloaking it with another homeowner’s IP and make it seem completely legit. This finds great use for people who want to employ aggressive data mining and get access to ticket and sneaker sites. Residential proxies are a bit more expensive compared to data server based proxies. Below is the best Residential proxies of 2020.

1. Scraper API

Scraper API is an amazing and fast-growing API service tool for web-scraping.

The service rotates IP addresses with each request, from a pool of millions of proxies across over a dozen ISPs, and automatically retries failed requests, so you will never be blocked.

IP rotating helps to avoid IP blocks and CAPTCHAS which can be quite useful when you are doing automated web scraping.

The service allows you to customize request headers, request type, IP geolocation and more.

They also offer very useful feature allowing to render javascript with a headless browser. It allows you to scrape HTML from pages build with Javascript frameworks.

Scraper API is ideal for developers who want to build scalable web scrapers quickly and easily.

Don't waste any more time managing hundreds or thousands of proxies, and integrating headless browsers into your deployment workflow.

website: https://www.scraperapi.com/

2. Proxybot

Beginner-friendly Proxy API service - ideal for anonymous web scraping.

Easy to use
30+ Million IPs
Various Geolocations
Proxy Protocol: HTTP(S) + Socks5
99.99% Network uptime
Unlimited Bandwidth

Proxybot is widely used for web scraping because it is capable of handling a large number of proxies. It also offers services to handle browser and different security checks like captchas.

It is beneficial to scrap the data from any website with a simple API call - no setup needed.

It offers to operate the IP Addresses from more than 12 countries around the world that enable the users to get the desired results using different geographical locations.

The proxy server attracts a vast number of web scrapers with the help of the ability to get content from websites built with a Javascript framework.

Rotating anonymous IPs making it impossible for websites to detect or block it.

Powerful and yer affordable. The pricing is available from $1.50.

website: https://proxybot.io/

3. Oxylabs

Advanced solution, easy to customize, world well for web crawlers

Type of Proxy Offer: Rotating residential IPs
The pool of Proxy Network：30 million IPs in Pool
How to Authentication: User Pass + IP Auth
Geo-Targeting: Cites/Countries (Worldwide)
Proxy Protocol: HTTP(S)

Oxylabs is another proxy server provider and offers a pool of more than 60 million residential IPs. It allows users to operate the IPs from anywhere around the world.

It offers many attractive features like rotating datacenter proxies and regular private proxies that are rotating automatically at the server level.

Besides, it offers various other services like proxies for data mining, proxies for crawling, proxies for web scraping, proxies for market research, or ad verification. It enables the users to complete the projects smoothly and quickly by using a large pool of IPs.

This proxy server is that it offers a Real-Time Crawler that is a web-based search engine and an excellent option for eCommerce scraper. It enables the web scrapers to mine the search engines and eCommerce websites easily.

The entry-level plan of this server is available at $300 that allows the users to use the data up to 20GB. If you want more, three advance level plans are available.

website: https://oxylabs.io/

5. Smartproxy

Best Budget, high quality, location targeting, and low error rates. Highest Performance for Anonymous Data Collection.

Type of Proxy Offer: Rotating residential IPs
The pool of Proxy Network：10 million IPs in Pool
How to Authentication: User Pass + IP Auth
Geo-Targeting: Cites/Countries (Worldwide)
Proxy Protocol: HTTP(S)

Smartproxy is one of the most trusted names in the residential proxy industry today. High-quality proxy pool, skilled 24/7 technical support, and user-friendly dashboard has earned Smartproxy premium residential proxy provider status. But is it really worth your money? In this review, I will take a detailed look at Smartproxy services and will try to find it out.

Smartproxy is a rotating residential proxy network which enables users to gather any data from the web using a pool of over 10 million proxies.

Smartproxy provides rotating proxies which are changing with each new request or sticky IP sessions to keep your session for a longer period (up to 10 minutes).

Smartproxy Datacenter proxies provides with both rotating and sticky ports which can hold your session for a longer period of time (30 minutes).

Using smartproxy is fairly simple - in the dashboard you will be able to select which port you want: rotating or sticky (currently provides IP up to 10min) and whether you want a random IP (any country) or target specific country/city. System will generate relevant endpoint in domain:port format.

website: https://smartproxy.com/

5. NetNut

Offering the fastest proxies on the market. Stable and reliable with high quality proxies.

Fastest proxies
Rotating residential IPs
The pool of Proxy Network: 10 million IPs
How to Authentication: User Pass + IP Auth
Geo-Targeting: Cites/Countries (Worldwide)
Proxy Protocol: HTTP(S)
Bandwidth or Request based

NetNut is one of the most advanced and smart proxy server providers that offer its services at affordable prices. It is a reliable and safe proxy provider. It offers a money-back guarantee that is not offered by many known service providers.

This proxy server offers a pool of more than twenty million residential proxies as well as offers unlimited bandwidth. It provides a simple and user-friendly dashboard for users to manage the usage and billing as well.

It is one of the easiest to operate a proxy server and offers extraordinary results for its customers. It is capable of connecting with IPs from around the world directly.

Moreover, it is one of the cheapest proxy servers and offers 100GB data at $700. It means it costs you $7 per GB. It offers the lowest price as compared to other proxy servers we discussed above.

website: https://netnut.io

6.GeoSurf

Geosurf offers superior property proxies at premium prices. It bills in between $8 and $15 per GB of transmission capacity relying on plan you select. Pricing plans starting at $450/month.

Not every residential IP coincides, and this might be the very best proxy solution for locating US property IPs that are not offered with various other solutions (regrettably they don't presently offer mobile proxy websites).

While this might not be the very best proxy carrier for those on a tight budget, this is among the instances where you get what you pay for, these are a few of the best property proxies around. They use special pools of proxies for certain use cases, such as Instagram proxies, Craigslist proxies, advertisement verification proxies and even more.

Another great aspect of their solution is that they offer IP addresses in a few countries that several various other solutions do not like China and Iran, so if you require proxies from those nations you may wish to check them out.

website: https://www.geosurf.com/

7. Luminati

Powerful Residential Proxy Network with the biggest proxy pool

Type of Proxy Offer: Offer both Rotating & static residential IPs
The pool of Proxy Network：72+ million IPs in pool
How to Authentication: User Pass + IP Auth
Geo-Targeting: ASN/Cites/Countries (Worldwide)
Proxy Protocol: HTTP(S) + Socks5
99.99% Network uptime
Unlimited concurrent connections
Limited bandwidth
Fast Response Time

Luminati is one of the most popular proxy service providers and offers a vast pool of residential proxies. The pool consists of more than 34 million IPs for web scrapers.

Furthermore, it offers to operate IP Addresses from almost every country in the world that attracts web scrapers for smooth working.
It is easy for scrapers to use trusted locations. It attracts marketing agencies to get the advantage of the diverse location to boost up the promotional services on different social media platforms from the desired location.

Furthermore, it is one of the most potent proxy servers, and it is not easy for the anti-proxy systems to detect it. Therefore, it minimizes the chances of getting caught and allows the users to complete the task smoothly.

Users can get the starter plan for this service at $500 and use the data up to 40GB. But if you want to use more, the advance plan is available at $1000 that allows the usage up to 100GB.

website: https://luminati.io

Conclusion

If you are looking to anonymously access the internet by hiding your IP regular proxy networks are great for you. But if you are searching for a way to not get banned and your work involves making a series of intense search requests and data scraping, you will find residential proxies useful.

The residential IP proxy addresses are tagged with the real location of other users. This makes you less prone to getting banned by avoiding overload on the servers as IP addresses are rotated. So residential proxies are perfect for harvesting and scraping research data from websites of your choice including sneaker and ticket websites that recognize and prohibit proxy data centers.

What are Residential proxies?

Peter Hansen — Sun, 17 May 2020 19:05:51 +0000

What is a proxy?
What are residential proxies?
What are residential IPs?
Why use a residential proxy network?
What are residential rotating proxies?
How do residential proxies work?
What are the Benefits of Residential Proxies?

Web scraping
Accessing ticket sites
Accessing sneaker sites
Ad verification

Residential proxy Providers
Conclusion

What is a proxy?

It is essential to understand what a proxy means in general before internalizing residential proxies. The Oxford Learner’s Dictionary defines a proxy as “an intermediary server between a user’s PC and the Internet that is used to unlock websites and access information that otherwise could be blocked”.

In simple terms, a proxy acts as a middle man between the real server and your computer, local network, or bigger scale networks. A proxy can be used for different purposes including protecting your security, accessing blocked content, or to avoid being monitored by federal or spy agencies.

What are residential proxies?

A residential proxy works over the default IP (residential IP) address allocated to you by your Internet service provider. Every residential proxy address is mapped to a physical location. Although the internet is vast and billions of devices log into the internet, each of their locations can be traced back by referring to their IP addresses. So if you are accessing the internet without a proxy you are giving away information every time you use the internet. This could be in terms of exposing your browser preferences, cookies, and your actual IP addresses itself.

Moreover, using the internet without a residential proxy poses limitations in terms of accessing geo-locked content. So you might not be able to access some content of your preference depending on the country you are located. Also, if your work involves using bots on social media platforms or scraping data for SEO analysis and deployment, your residential IP address can be identified and blocked leading to the inability to access desired webpages. Fortunately, with the use of residential proxy network, you can circumvent these problems.

Fortunately, technologies such as residential proxy networks allow us to circumvent these problems.

What are residential IPs?

Before we try to know what a residential proxy is, we need to understand what a Residential IP is.

A residential IP address pinpoints the physical location of a device which can be your personal computer or a mobile phone. While the information about ISP, real owners, and residential IP addresses are available on the public databases, websites can examine the network, ISP, and location of users who visit them. The majority of online services consider residential IP addresses as real people and see data center IP addresses as spam.

The key benefit of residential proxy IPs is that they are physically linked to the original location and are legit. They show up as real IP addresses and so unlikely they will get banned as they are not identified as data centers. This makes residential proxies excellent for internet use.

Why use a residential proxy network?

There are many reasons why you would want to hide your real IP address. This could be for scraping data from different websites, upload and download torrents via P2P connections, access multiple accounts from the same computer, or stream geo-blocked content.

Whatever might be the reason, using a residential proxy network is a great way to hide your real identity online. It gives you a genuine IP address that is similar to a default residential IP address and hides your IP from servers and scraping bots online which maintain your anonymity.

The only disadvantage is that search engines allow you to make a specific number of search requests within minutes. So using a single server setup can limit search engine access and even get you banned if you repeatedly exceed the limit.

What are residential rotating proxies?

Rotating residential proxies (Backconnect Proxies) are a modification of regular residential proxies. While a residential proxy hides your original IP address behind another IP address, rotating residential proxies use a bunch of proxies to conceal your identity. At regular intervals or every session, these proxies automatically take turns to emulate the real activity. This allows you to make many requests without getting identified as a spammer or get flagged for suspicious activity.

Below is a sequence of events that happen every time you make a server request. :

You make a search request, For example, if you search for a word or a string of words, let’s say “something”, a connection is created, let's consider this as Connection 1.
The server processes the request and returns the result https://something.com/. If this search is repeated at a high rate using a bot, the search engine will flag this suspicious and ban the connection.

When you connect through a residential rotating proxy or backconnect proxy, every search you make will be directed through different connections. This reduces the risk of getting blocked due to making many requests. As the residential proxy rotates your IP, you will get a new identity for every search you perform. This enables you to avoid being detected as suspicious and eventually get blocked.

How do residential proxies work?

Residential proxies work by routing internet traffic through a server that acts as an intermediary. The proxy server channels every search request you perform by identifying each of them by an alternative IPs.

The alternative IP addresses assigned belong to real devices unlike those assigned by VPNs which are server-based addresses. So when you perform a search, it is sent to the server where information is stored using a residential proxy. This way the original IP of your device is concealed and the server only sees the residential proxy, not the real user address. So the real user cannot be identified.
A good residential proxy package depending on the service provider gives the option of targeting specific cities, countries and all requests are HTTPS encrypted for security.

So, if you are wondering what the use cases of residential proxies are, we will discuss them in further sections. Residential IPs are the most reliable and genuine in comparison to other types of proxies. Based on browsing needs, residential proxies can be used for different purposes. Below are some of the uses of residential proxies that might interest you.

What are the Benefits of Residential Proxies?

There are various advantages of using residential proxy services. Below are various benefits of using residential proxies that you should know of.

Web scraping

Internet area marketing is a vast of marketing that is used extensively today. This revolves around more than just posting on social media or engaging in casual ad campaigns. One of the key aspects of internet marketing is studying your competitors and learning their ways. This is a great way to access information about your competitors by performing web scraping. Web scraping is possible with residential proxies because it supports scraping of data on large scale continuously without getting identified by servers as suspicious as a residential proxy rotates IP addresses. The data center proxies are used for web scraping but on a smaller scale. If you want to perform web scraping on a large scale on Linkedin, Google, Facebook, and other giant sites, you will have to use residential proxies.

Accessing ticket sites

Residential proxies are immensely more efficient when used for scraping ticket sites. They give you access to comparing the ticket prices across different service providers. The conventional way of screening ticket sites using ticket proxies revolves around data center proxies. These get easily identified and are banned because of the usage of the same proxies. It is practically impossible to flag residential proxies as they act like real IP addresses by ticket sites. So you get unlimited access to ticket providers to get the volume of information you want for the post-analysis.

Accessing sneaker sites

Shoe sites are one of the strictly monitored sites because of the concerns of design copying, identity theft, and purchase limitation. Even though this is the case, it is possible to access the information available on shoe sites on a quick and large scale using residential proxies. Compared to residential proxies, sneaker proxies seem overrated. Sneaker proxies are just a renaming for data center IP proxies. Today sneaker proxies are identified by popular sites such as EastBay, Nike, and Supreme Shoes as shoe bots. To overcome this problem, residential proxies can be used. There is a less chance for residential proxies to be blacklisted on shoe sites

Ad verification

Residential proxies are commonly used for reputation management and verification of ads. They give you a way to check and verify ads displayed on various websites and block the ones that are suspicious and not created by you. Many competitors could try to damage the reputation of your brand in different ways.

If you are thinking about choosing a residential proxy provider, you need to select a one that is easy to use and should support different platforms for accurate media monitoring, ad tracking, and content compliance. These are the different reasons why you need to consider having residential IPs for verification of ads.

Residential proxy Providers

Conclusion

The Ultimate Guide to Residential proxies for web scraping

Peter Hansen — Tue, 05 May 2020 19:28:27 +0000

The Ultimate Guide to Proxies for Web Scraping

Proxy management is the most crucial component of any web scraping project. Those serious about web scraping know that using proxies is mandatory when scraping the web at any reasonable scale. It often happens, that proxy issue management and troubleshooting actually take more time than creating and maintaining the web scrapers themselves. In this detailed guide, you will be able to know the differences between the main proxy options as well as the factors that should be considered when picking a proxy solution for your project or business.

What is a proxy? Why it is needed when web scraping?
Why proxies are important for web scraping?
Why prefer a proxy pool?
Which is the best proxy solution for you?
- Datacenter IPs
- Residential IPs
- Mobile IPs
Public, shared, or dedicated proxies?
How you can manage your proxy pool?
Do It Yourself
Proxy Rotators
How to pick the best proxy solution for your project?
How much can you spend?
What is your top priority?
What are your available resources and technical skills?
Build in-house or done for your solutions?
Proxy providers
Proxy services
What are the legal considerations when using proxies?

What is a proxy? Why it is needed when web scraping?

Before explaining what proxies are, let’s understand what an IP address is and how it works. Giving each device a unique identity, an IP address is a numerical address allocated to every device that has a connection with an Internet Protocol network like the internet. An IP address usually looks like this: 199.125.7.315.

A proxy server works as a middle man between a client and a server. It takes a request from the client and redirects it to the target server. Using a proxy gives you the ability to scrape the web anonymously if you want to. The website you are making the request to is unable to see your IP address but the IP address of the proxy.

The world has transitioned to a newer standard called IPv6 from IPv4 at present. The creation of more IP addresses will be allowed by this newer version. Although, IPv6 has still not gained immense acceptance in the proxy business. Thus, the IPv4 standard is still mostly used by IPs.

Using a third-party proxy is recommended while scraping a website. In case your scraping is overburdening their servers or if they would like you to stop scraping the data displayed on their website, you should set your company name as the “User-Agent” HTTP header so the website owner can contact you.

Why proxies are important for web scraping?

Making unlimited concurrent sessions on the same or different websites is possible by using proxies.
If you want to make a higher volume of requests to a target website without being banned, then using a proxy pool serves the purpose.
Using a proxy or especially a pool of proxies noticeably diminishes the chances that your spider will get banned or blocked. Thus, it offers a reliable website crawling experience.
Proxy usage allowing you to bypass/avoid IP bans/blocks. Websites very often block requests from AWS due to malicious actors overloading websites having large volumes of requests using AWS servers
Proxies making it possible to send your request from a specific geographical location. This makes it possible for you to see the precise content that the website displays for that given location or device. When scraping product data from online retailers, this becomes extremely significant.

Why prefer a proxy pool?

Using a single proxy for website scrapping is not recommended because it results in the reduction of your crawling reliability, geotargeting options, and the number of concurrent requests you can make. That’s why building a pool of proxies is required that you can route your requests through while breaking the total traffic over a large number of proxies.

There are various factors on which depend the size of your proxy. They have a huge impact on the effectiveness of your proxy pool. These are mentioned below:

Number of requests you will be making every hour
Type of IPs used by you as proxies - datacenter, residential or mobile IPs
The complexity of the proxy management approach - proxy rotation, throttling, session administration, etc.
Target websites - bigger websites have better measures against programmatic web scrapping which requires a larger proxy pool.
Quality of the IPs being used as proxies - public proxies, shared or private dedicated proxies, datacenter, residential or mobile IPs. Due to the nature of the network, data center IPs are sometimes more stable than residential/mobile IPs but typically lower quality than residential IPs and mobile IPs.

If the configuration of your proxy pool for your specific web scraping project is not done properly, then your proxies may get blocked sometimes and you will not be able to access the target website.

Which is the best proxy solution for you?

Selecting the best proxy option is not an easy task at all. Every proxy provider is claiming that they have the best proxy IPs on the web without telling you exactly why. You need to analyze which is the best proxy solution for your particular project.

In this section, let’s discuss the different types of IPs that can be used as proxies and which one is suited for your needs.

First, let’s discuss the fundamentals of proxies - the underlying IP’s. There are three main types of IPs to choose from and each type has its own pros and cons.

Datacenter IPs

The most common type, these are the IPs of servers housed in data centers. These are the cheapest to buy. A very robust web crawling solution can be built for your business with the right proxy management solution.

Residential IPs

Enabling you to route your request through a residential network, these IPs are tougher to obtain and are expensive. However, it is also true that there are situations wherein you could easily achieve the same results with cheaper datacenter IPs. Legal/consent issues are also raised as you are using a person’s personal network for web scrapping.

Mobile IPs

These are the IPs of private mobile devices. These are very expensive because acquiring the IPs of mobile devices is very hard. For the majority of web scraping tasks, mobile IPs are excessive measures unless you intend to just scrape the results displayed to mobile users. Additionally, the result of mobile IP can raise more legal/consent issues because sometimes, the device owner is not completely aware that you are using their GSM network for web scraping.

Datacenter IPs are recommended for most of the cases. Along with that, you should put in place a robust proxy management solution. This is a good option if you want the best results at the lowest cost. These IPs give similar results as residential or mobile IPs without the legal concerns and at a fraction of the cost if there is proper proxy management.

Public, shared, or dedicated proxies?

Whether you should use public, shared or dedicated proxies are also very important to discuss before you pick the right option.

Staying clear of public proxies or open proxies is a general rule. These are of very low quality and can be dangerous as well. Anyone can use these proxies and thus, they quickly get used to slam websites with huge amounts of dubious requests. As a result, they get blacklisted and blocked by websites very quickly. They are often infected with malware and other viruses as well. Therefore, using a public proxy would mean running the risk of spreading any present malware, infecting your own machines, and even making public your web scraping activities in case you haven't properly configured your security (SSL certificates, etc.).

Deciding between a shared and dedicated proxy is a bit difficult. Your need for performance and your budget using a service where you pay for access to a shared pool of IPs might be the right option for you, depending on the size of your project. Paying for a dedicated pool of proxies might be the better option for you if you have a big budget and when the performance is of high priority.

Picking the right type of proxy is only the tip of the iceberg. Managing your pool of proxies so they don’t get banned is the real tricky part.

How you can manage your proxy pool?

Purchasing a pool of proxies and routing your requests via them is not a long-term solution if you want to on scrape at any reasonable scale. Inevitably, your proxies will be banned and stop returning high-quality data.

Below mentioned are the major challenges that you will face while managing a proxy pool:

User-Agents- Managing user agents is important for having a healthy crawl.
Using Delays- Creating random delays and applying a smart throttling system to help hide the fact that you are scraping.
Retry Errors- Your proxies need to be able to retry the request with different proxies in case they experience any errors, bans, timeouts, etc.
Geographical Targeting- To make sure that only some proxies will be used on certain websites, you will be required to configure your pool sometimes.
Control Proxies- There is a requirement by some scraping proxies that you keep a session with the same proxy. Thus, you should configure your proxy pool to allow for this.
Identify Bans- Detection of numerous types of bans is a very important responsibility of your proxy solution so that you can troubleshoot and fix the underlying problem, i.e. captchas, redirects, blocks, ghosting, etc.

Managing a pool of proxies in 100s or 1000s is a very tough task. You have three chief solutions to overcome these problems- Do It Yourself, Proxy Rotators, and Done For You Solutions.

Do It Yourself

Purchasing a pool of shared or dedicated proxies along with building and tweaking a proxy management solution is to be done by you in this situation for overcoming all the challenges you run into. This is a cheap option but consumes a lot of time and resources. This method should only be chosen if you have a devoted web scraping team that can manage your proxy pool, or you don’t have the required budget and can’t afford anything better.

Proxy Rotators

You can also purchase your proxies from a provider that also provides proxy rotation and geographical targeting. The more basic proxy management issues are taken care of in this situation. With this, you can develop and manage session management, throttling, ban identification logic, etc.

How to pick the best proxy solution for your project?

Deciding on an approach to building and managing your proxy pool is not an easy task. While deciding on the best proxy solution for your needs, there are some important questions that you should ask yourself:

How much can you spend?

Managing your own proxy pool is going to be the cheapest option in case you have a very limited or virtually non-existent budget. But you should consider outsourcing your proxy management if you even have a small budget. This way, you will get an effective solution that manages everything.

What is your top priority?

Buying your own pool of proxies and managing them yourself is the best option when your number one priority is to know everything about proxies and web scrapping. But like most of the companies, if you are aiming to get the web data and achieve maximum performance from your web scraping, then it’s better to outsource your proxy management. At the very least, you can use a proxy rotator.

What are your available resources and technical skills?

If you want to manage your own proxy pool for a reasonable size web scraping project, then you should have a basic level of software development knowledge and bandwidth for building and maintaining your spiders’ proxy management logic. If you neither have the required expertise or the bandwidth, then you should use a proxy rotator and build your own proxy management infrastructure.

Answering these questions will help you in deciding which approach to proxy management suits your needs in the best possible way.

Build in-house or done for your solutions?

Buying access to a shared pool of IPs and managing the proxy management logic yourself is probably your best option if your focus is on learning all about web scraping. This is also the most suitable choice if you have budget constraints. However, you should consider using either a proxy rotator and building the other management infrastructure in-house or a done for you proxy management solution if you are targeting on having the needed web data with no hassle or maximizing your web scraping performance.

Proxy providers

A proxy provider offering proxy rotation as a service should be used if you are willing to do it on your own. The first layer of managing your proxies will be removed with this. Please note, that you still would like to create a mechanism to manage sessions, throttle HTTP requests in order to prevent IP bans/blocks.

Here you can find a list with best residential proxy providers.

Proxy services

If you are begginer and don't want to want to spend time for proxy management, however you still need to proxy your request - you can user proxy services.

Proxy services manages a huge pool of proxies, carefully rotating, throttling, blacklists, and selecting the optimal IPs to use for any individual request to give the optimal results at a minimal cost. Thus, the hassle of managing IPs is removed completely. Users can focus on the data, not proxies.

Take for example Proxybot service. You simply need to send a request to Proxybot API and it will proxy your HTTP request and send you a response from yor target server.

https://proxybot.io/api/v1/{API_KEY}?url={YOU_TARGET_URL}

What are the legal considerations when using proxies?

When it comes to web scraping and proxies, you should also be aware of the legal considerations. Using a proxy IP to visit a website is legal. Although, there are some points that you need to keep in mind in order to make sure you don't stray into a grey area.

With the ability to make a huge volume of requests to a website without the website being easily able to identify you, people can get greedy and overload a website’s servers with too many requests. This is never the right thing to do.

You should always be respectful to the websites you scrape if you are a web scraper. You should always comply with web scraping best practices in order to make sure that your spiders cause no harm to the websites you are scraping. You should limit your requests or stop scraping if the website informs that your scraping is burdening their site or is unwanted. You will not run into any legal matters as long as you are ethical.

The other legal consideration you should give importance when using residential or mobile IPs is whether you have the IPs owners’ explicit consent to use their IP for web scraping or not. This is stated in our Web Scrapers Guide to GDPR.

You should make sure that the residential IP’s owner has given an open consent for their home or mobile IP to be used as a web scraping proxy.

You will be required to handle this consent yourself in case you have your own residential IPs. Although, if you have decided to obtain residential proxies from a third-party provider, then before using the proxy for your web scraping project, you should make sure that they have got consent and are in compliance with GDPR.

Guide To Rotating Proxy 2020

Peter Hansen — Thu, 02 Apr 2020 10:55:11 +0000

The primary purpose of rotating proxy is to hide the identity of the user while surfing on the internet. Additionally, proxies are an excellent option to increase the speed of web browsing as well as to create the security fence around the network.

There are different types of proxies available over the internet that is used for various purposes. Rotating proxy is one of them.

Mostly, developers use this proxy for scraping the data from websites. Because it makes the scraping easy by hiding the identity as well as avoid blocking of IP Address by website owners.

Contents:

What is Rotating Proxy?
Why Use Rotating Proxy?
What To Consider While Selecting The Proxy?
Top Rotating Proxy Providers in 2020
Conclusion

What is Rotating Proxy?

A rotating proxy is one of the most advance forms of proxy servers and widely used for web scraping. The reason behind it is that it allows the users to create a pool of IP Addresses. It is beneficial to send thousands of script requests to different websites located on different web servers.

Usually, during web scraping, web servers detect the IP Address with multiple visits and mark it as suspicious. After marking it suspicious, sometimes the web server blocks the IP Address or put some security check like Captcha as the IP Address visit again. Therefore, to avoid this type of problem, IP rotation is beneficial.

Furthermore, IP rotation not only provides random IP Address but also enables the users to use the IP Address from multiple locations around the world. It reduces the chances of being caught, and websites detect if they have a powerful anti-proxy system.

Why Use Rotating Proxy?

As we mentioned in the above discussion, the primary purpose of IP Rotation is to hide the identification during web serving. Secondly, it is helpful to prevent detection and blocking during web scraping.

However, there are various other benefits of using IP Rotation. For example, SEO experts have to work a lot with keyword optimization, and it is time-consuming to collect the data of keywords for various locations.

SEO experts have to manage the website for users from different regions around the world. Therefore, it is easy for them to change the location and get keyword data quickly for different places.

Furthermore, intelligence companies use IP rotation on a broad basis for scraping the website to analyze the performance of sites. IP rotation helps them to work with high anonymity without being detected and blocked.

Marketing firms use special marketing software specifically designed to create a buzz around the product or brand.

Every bot is assigned with a different social media account, and the programming of software makes it capable to like comments or posts. Even in some cases, the bots can write the comments automatically on company pages.

However, all this process is possible without using proxies but for a limited time. Social media platforms are equipped with special measures that are capable of detecting the use of tools like this.

If there is a large number of accounts operating like this from the same IP Address, they will block it. Therefore, the use of proxies is beneficial to avoid this problem by assigning a different IP address for every bot with a different account.

What To Consider While Selecting The Proxy?

Not all the proxy servers provide the same services. Instead, the proxy service varies from each other substantially. Therefore, we point out a few essential factors that you must consider while selecting the proxy server.

1. Speed

Speed is one of the essential factors in proxy selection because the speed of your work ultimately depends on the speed of proxy. Sometimes proxy service providers put a cap over the speed and threads even they limit bandwidth if your usage is high.

Therefore, it is essential to select a company that provides services without any type of limitations. It is necessary for smooth working; otherwise, it takes a lot of time to make you online and complete working as well.

2. Trusted Geographical Location

Geographical location is important because it let the users operate the proxy from their desired location. Also, some regions are considered as suspicious and famous for making spams and scams. Therefore, when you send multiple requests from suspicious areas, it is easy for the websites to detect the presence of proxy, and they block the IP Address ultimately.

However, you can change the IP Address and send a request for data again, but it is not free from the risk of detection. It's not fun. Instead, it takes a lot of time and resources as well.

Therefore, it is essential to select the proxy’s server that provides services from trusted locations only. For example, US proxies are considered as good, and websites didn't put more focus on these locations.

However, there are various other trusted locations are also available that you can select the one as per your needs and requirements.

3. Compatibility With Different Tools

There are many proxy service providers; some of them provide compatibility with all the tools for marketing or other purposes available over the internet.

While some offer limited compatibility. Therefore, it is necessary to know about the compatibility of proxy service with a particular tool you want to use with proxy. If you buy the proxy server and it didn't provide compatibility, your spending on the proxy server goes in vain.

It is recommended to use the server that offers broad compatibility. Because it is beneficial if you switch the tool, you can easily use it with the same proxy server.

4. Subnet Diversity

The primary purpose of proxies is to make your identity anonymous. Still, the lack of subnet diversity makes it difficult to hide the status while surfing the net online.

Many service providers offer the same subnet for all IP Addresses, which makes it easy for websites to detect your presence.

When users make requests the same subnet, although the rest of the IP address is different, the websites can detect and block your services. Therefore, it is essential to select the proxy service provider that offers a variety of subnets.

The more diversity makes it easy for you to get the desired result from proxy servers. Diversity enables users to browse the internet without fear of being getting caught.

5. Website Compatibility

Like the tool's compatibility, some proxy servers are unable to provide services for various famous websites like Facebook, Amazon, etc. Just imagine what happens if you buy the proxy server that is not compatible to use with your desired website.

Therefore, it is essential to check the compatibility of proxy with different websites that are beneficial to complete your task efficiently without spending to buy additional products.

6. Customer Support

Although you can set up the proxy without facing any problem, even then, customer support is essential. It is the priority of users that the service provider remains to stand by all the time. So that users can get help from them in case of any problem.

Therefore, you must consider buying the proxy services from the company that has reliable customer service. It allows the users to contact any time with the customer support team and get a solution for their problems.

Top Proxy Servers Providers

A huge number of proxy server providers are available over the internet. The following link has a comprehensive article about the most popular proxy providers.

Conclusion

Proxy servers offer a lot of benefits for a wide range of users. However, it is crucial to select the right proxy service provider for getting the desired results.

In the above discussions, we discussed in detail all the features and functions of rotating proxies along with top proxy service providers. Hopefully, you get a lot of benefits from it.

Web Scraping with no coding

Peter Hansen — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 22:37:45 +0000

Hello World 👋 🌍,

In this article, I will show how easy it can be to do Web Scraping.

I will show how to extract content ( text, HTML, links, images, etc..) form a webpage without writing code.

The only thing you will need to do is to send an HTTP request and specify CSS selectors of elements you want to scrape.

Below you can see an example of a basic request body.

A response can be an array with extracted values or it could be in JSON like format.

For the Demo I’m going to use:

1) Books to scrape — a playground for web scraping.

2) Postman — app for sending HTTP requests.
3) Proxybot — API service helper tool for web scraping.

Let’s get started 👨‍💻

For people who prefer watching videos, there is a quick video showing how to scrape basic webpages.

The idea is very simple, we just need to:

Find a page we want to scrape
Get CSS selector of desired elements
Send HTTP POST request with a Body containing CSS selectors from step

And now the same steps but just with more details 🔎.

1) Find a page we want to scrape

We will use the ‘Books to Scrape’ (http://books.toscrape.com/) website as our web scraping playground.

The ‘Books to Scrape’ website contains dummy information about various books.

The website is ideal if you want to practice basic web scraping skills.

2) Get CSS selector of desired elements

In order to get CSS for desired elements, we need to open Dev tools of your desired browser and inspect elements.

Inspecting a book element gives us the following HTML markup 🕵.

NB! We will use the above HTML for creating request objects.

3) Send HTTP POST request to API service 🚀

In the below example we will extract title and link for all the books found on the page.

Request URL :

https://proxybot.io/api/v1/API_KEY?url=http://books.toscrape.com

Request BODY:

We specify CSS selector for book’s title and request to get its value as text. However, for the link’s value, we need to instruct service to get the value from the href attribute.

The response will contain titles and links of all books on the page.

Response:

This is already super cool!

If you are interested in only specific data then this type of response might be already good enough.

However, I would like to have a formatted response, let's see how we can achieve that.

Request BODY for formatted response:

We need to ask to return “json” and provide an array with selectors in “extract” property.

Additionally, we can specify “as” property which will be used for formatting the response object.

The above request will result in the following response

Formatted response:

Wow! We can specify the format of an object we want to get back! How cool is that?

Congratulations 🥳 Now you know how to scrape websites without coding. As you can see it is pretty simple. I hope this article was interesting and useful.

In case you looking for a proxy providers, here you can find a list with TOP 7 proxy providers in 2021.

How to scrape HTML from a website built with Javascript?

Peter Hansen — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 20:34:34 +0000

Hello World ✌️,

In this article, I would like to tell about how you can scrape HTML content from a website build with the Javascript framework.

But why it is even a problem to scrape a JS-based website? 🤔

Problem Definition:

You need to have a browser environment in order to execute Javascript code that will render HTML.

If you will try open this website (https://web-scraping-playground-site.firebaseapp.com) in your browser — you will see a simple page with some content.

However, if you will try to send HTTP GET request to the same url in the Postman — you will see a different response.

A response to GET request ‘https://web-scraping-playground-site.firebaseapp.com’ in made in the Postman.

What? Why the response contains no HTML? It is happening because there is no browser environment when we sending requests from a server or Postman app.

🎓 We need a browser environment for executing Javascript code and rendering content — HTML.

It sounds like an easy and fun problem to solve! In the below 👇 section I will show 2 ways how to solve the above-mentioned problem using:

Puppeteer — a Node library developed by Google.
Proxybot — an API service for web scraping.

Let's get started 👨‍💻

For people who prefer watching videos, there is a quick video 🎥 demonstrating how to get an HTML content of a JS-based website.

Solution using Puppeteer

The idea is simple. Use puppeteer on our server for simulating the browser environment in order to render HTML of a page and use it for scraping or something else 😉.

See the below code snippet.

This code simply:

Accepts GET request
Receives ‘url’ param
Returns response of the ‘getPageHTML’ function

The ‘getPageHTML’ function is the most interesting for us because that’s where the magic happens.

The ‘magic’ is, however, pretty simple. The function simply does the following steps:

Launch puppeteer
Open the desired url
Internally executes JS
Extract HTML of the page
Return the HTML

Easy-peasy 👏

Let’s run the script and send a request to http://localhost:3000?url=https://web-scraping-playground-site.firebaseapp.com in the Postman app.

The below screenshot shows the response from our local server.

Yaaaaay 🎉🎉🎉 We Did it! Great job guys! We got HTML back!

It was easy, but it can be even easier, let’s have a look at the second approach.

Solution using Proxybot

With this approach, we actually only need to send an HTTP GET request. The API service will run a virtual browser internally and send you back HTML.

https://proxybot.io/api/v1/API_KEY?render_js=true&url=your-url-here

Let’s try to call the API in the Postman app.

Yaaay 🎊🎊🎊 More HTML!

There is not much to say about the request, because it is pretty straightforward. However, I want to emphasize a small detail. When calling the API to remember to include the render_js=true url param.

Otherwise, the service will not execute Javascript 🤓

Congratulations 🥳 Now you can scrape websites build with javascript frameworks like Angular, React, Ember etc..

I hope this article was interesting and useful.

Proxybot it just one of the services allowing you to proxy your requests. If you are looking for proxy providers here you can find a list with best proxy providers.

Use a proxy with Puppeteer

Peter Hansen — Sat, 08 Feb 2020 22:29:56 +0000

In this article, I would like to show 2 ways how to use proxy in Puppeteer.

1) Configuring puppeteer LaunchOptions
2) Using proxy API service

For people who prefer watching videos, there is a quick video demonstrating how to use the proxy API service.

For the demo purposes, I will use the
https://whatismyipaddress.com website to see the IP address in the incoming requests.

The website shows information about an incoming request: IP address, country, region, etc..

We will open this page with puppeteer using different proxies and see how country information is changed depending on proxy server we use.

Below you can see our basic puppeteer script opening ‘whatismyipaddress.com’ pape.

In the below sections we will modify this code snippet to use a proxy server.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

async function run() {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    headless: false
  });

  const page = await browser.newPage();

  const pageUrl = 'https://whatismyipaddress.com/';

  await page.goto(pageUrl);
}

run();

1) Configuring puppeteer LaunchOptions

In order to use a proxy, we need to modify LaunchOptions object and pass additional property: args specifying IP and port of a proxy server we would like to use.

args: [ '--proxy-server=IP_HERE:PORT_HERE' ]

The modified script will look like this.

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

async function run() {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    headless: false,
    args: [ '--proxy-server=200.73.128.156:3128' ]
  });
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  const pageUrl = 'https://whatismyipaddress.com/';

  await page.goto(pageUrl);
}

run();

Now the ‘whatismyipaddress.com’ website will be opened through the specified proxy ( which is located in Argentina) and we will see different IP and information about the country.

Please note that the life of public proxy servers is short and at the moment of reading this article the server used in the above example might be already dead.

You can find plenty of online resources providing lists with public proxy servers you can use for FREE. However, free doesn’t always mean good and reliable.

Very often public proxies are slow, not reliable and expire pretty quickly. My advice would be to invest in access to premium proxies you can rely on.

2) Using proxy API service

For this example, we don’t need to find proxy servers because API service we going to is doing it internally.

The only thing we need to change is to modify the URL we trying to open.

There are several API proxies available, but for this demo, I’ve decided to use proxybot service because, in my opinion, it is one of the easiest to use.

We simply need to prepend our url with API service url:

https://proxybot.io/api/v1/API_KEY?url=www.your-target-website.com

The modified puppeteer script will look like this:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

async function run() {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({ headless: false });
  const page = await browser.newPage();

  const proxy = 'https://proxybot.io/api/v1/API_KEY?url=';
  const url = 'https://whatismyipaddress.com/';
  const pageUrl = proxy + url;

  await page.goto(pageUrl);
}

run();

This approach removes the need to search and maintain proxy servers because the Proxybot will take care of it.

As you can it is very easy to use proxy with the puppeteer. Simply choose an option that suits your needs the best.

I really hope it was useful and helpful for you guys and girls.

PS: Proxybot it just one of the services allowing you to proxy your requests. If you are looking for proxy providers here you can find a list with top proxy providers in 2021.

Happy coding 👨‍💻👩‍💻

How to Proxy HTTP requests?

Peter Hansen — Wed, 05 Feb 2020 19:19:28 +0000

Hello world ✌️,

In this article, I would like to show you how you can proxy HTTP requests with absolutely no coding.

GIST:
The idea is that we going to use API service to send an HTTP request through a random proxy server. In this case, there is no need to maintain proxy servers on your side.

For people who prefer watching videos instead of reading, there is a quick video demonstrating how to use the proxy API service.

I have chosen to show proxybot service because, In my opinion, it is one of the easiest to use. Additionally, it is possible to create a free account and start using service for free. The actual service usage is pretty simple:
You just need to send an HTTP request with the following URL:

https://proxybot.io/api/v1/API_KEY?url=www.your-target-website.com

Your request will be sent through a random proxy. There is also a possibility to send your request through proxy servers located in a specific country.

For example, if you want your request to come from Germany, then you need to append ‘&geolocation_code=de’ URL parm to your request

https://proxybot.io/api/v1/API_KEY?url=www.your-target-website.com&geolocation_code=de

A full list of available geolocations and documentation can be found here.

Yes, it is that easy, just sending an HTTP request and stop worrying about searching and maintaining proxy servers manually.

PS: Proxybot it just one of the services allowing you to proxy your request. If you are looking for proxy providers here you can find a list with top proxy providers in 2021.

I hope that this article was useful and you found information that will help you.

Have a nice day ✌️