Significantly reducing the chances that your spider will get banned or blocked. Using a proxy (especially a pool of proxies - more on this later) allows you to crawl a website much more reliably.There are a number of reasons why proxies are important for data web scraping: When scraping a website, we recommend that you use a 3rd party proxy and set your company name as the user agent so the website owner can contact you if your scraping is overburdening their servers or if they would like you to stop scraping the data displayed on their website. However, in the proxy business IPv6 is still not a big thing so most IPs still use the IPv4 standard. This newer version will allow for the creation of more IP addresses.
When using a proxy, the website you are making the request to no longer sees your IP address but the IP address of the proxy, giving you the ability to scrape the web anonymously if you choose.Ĭurrently, the world is transitioning from IPv4 to a newer standard called IPv6. Most IP addresses look like this:Ī proxy is a 3rd party server that enables you to route your request through their servers and use their IP address in the process. What is a proxy: How can you define proxies and why do you need them for web scraping?īefore we discuss what a proxy is we first need to understand what an IP address is and how they work.Īn IP address is a numerical address assigned to every device that connects to an Internet Protocol network like the internet, giving each device a unique identity. Zyte Smart Proxy Manager (formally Crawlera) handles your proxy management for you, allowing you to focus more on building your scraping and crawling logic. The amount of retries as well as specific kinds of browser profiles and other settings can be selected by users using an API, which can help cut down bans if you know of certain settings which can be reliable. When bans are detected it will try again using a new proxy/profile.
It monitors the responses to detect when bans occur, either by checking the response status or following site specific rules to classify unexpected responses as bans. Zyte Smart Proxy Manager (formally Crawlera) selects proxies and browser profiles from pools when users are trying to access websites. Using Zyte Smart Proxy Manager can allow you to offload proxy management of your scraping project and help you focus on building your scraping and crawler logic. A user can give instructions to Crawlera using an API allowing features such as setting a browser profile or using IPs from a certain region to help mimic requests from real users. It routes requests through a pool of IPs, throttling access by introducing delays and discarding proxies from the pool when they get banned or have similar problems when accessing certain domains. Zyte Smart Proxy Manager (formally Crawlera) is a proxy manager designed specifically for web crawling and scraping. In this guide, we will cover everything you need to know about the best proxies for web scraping and how they will make your life easier. However, it is common for managing and troubleshooting proxy issues to consume more time than building and maintaining the spiders themselves. When scraping the web at any reasonable scale, using proxies is an absolute must. If you are serious about web scraping you’ll quickly realize that proxy management is a critical component of any web scraping project.