Residential proxies are a key element when choosing your company’s tools box. If you find yourself reading more about residential proxies for scraping – It seems like you are in the web scraping business.
Whether already a pro or just getting started, you will quickly understand that proxy management is one of the scraping’s crucial aspects. With websites and social media platforms becoming extremely vigilant about who is using their services, web scraping and extracting web data using datacenter IPs has become next to impossible.
Read on to discover 10 reasons to use a residential proxy network for scraping and extracting web data.
Why scrape data from the web?
The importance and the need for scraping data differ from one organization to another. However, to start with the basics, web data extraction is useful for:
• Competitor price monitoring for e-commerce purposes
• Lead generation
• Search Engine Result Page (SERP) tracking for SEO
• Travel fares and news aggregation
• Brand monitoring and ad verification
• Market research and analysis
• Marketing automation
• Machine learning
It is not wrong to state that proper web scraping can be a boon for your business, and doing it without any blockade is equally essential. Worry not, as residential proxies are here to rescue web scrapers, which are constantly on the lookout for tracking competitors, and implementing business decisions and strategies based on their competitive research.
Before we delve into the 10 Reasons to use residential proxies for scraping web data, it is of paramount importance to understand what proxies are and what a proxy is.
What is a proxy?
IP address: An IP address is a numerical address assigned to devices that connect to the internet. IP addresses give a unique identity to devices.
Proxy: A proxy acts as a layer between devices and the internet. Proxies are third party providers that route device requests to the internet through their servers. As a result of that, the proxy server IP address is visible to websites instead of the actual device IP.
Types of proxies:
Datacenter Proxies: Most common proxies are hosted in data centers. Datacenter IPs are common, cheap, and easily traceable.
Residential Proxies: Provide real IP addresses of actual devices. When using a residential IP for scraping (or even just accessing web pages), you appear to be accessing websites and social media platforms from an actual home-based IP, making it virtually impossible to detect or ban, and it’s more stable and secure, which is reflected by its pricing.
Now that you know the basics of proxies, and it is clear that using residential proxies for scraping and accessing the web, though a bit expensive, are pretty much the best option for cloaking your online identity with ease.
The 10 Reasons to use Residential Proxies for Scraping Web Data
1. Anonymity
Most websites and social media platforms can now track the IPs accessing their network, thus blocking the datacenter IPs that belong to corporate accounts. Hence, for effective web scraping strategies, the need to remain anonymous is paramount.
By routing your request through an actual home-based IP, residential IPs provide you with anonymity on the internet, thus allowing you to carry out all your web scraping strategies and extract web data with ease.
2. Reliability
When you access the internet from a datacenter IP, websites tend to feed you with misleading data that can set you off track and prove to be bad for your business. Accurate information is essential for retail price comparison or brand protection needs.
In such cases, using a residential proxy network ensures you are delivered with the same data as any other website user. Accurate data delivered when using residential proxies for scraping is crucial, allows you to compare prices, protect your brand identity in an effective manner.
3. Wider Geo-Targeting Options
Certain websites, search engines, and social media platforms feed geography specific information to their users. If you need to access geo-specified data from web platforms for price comparison or brand protection, using optimized residential proxies for scraping these “challenging” websites can be your best bet.
Residential proxies provide an IP address at a selected country, city, or state level, allowing you to obtain geo-targeted data from a vast amount of available IPs. With this flexibility, you can collect a wide range of desired data.
4. Higher Requests Volume
Effective web scraping requires you to send a large volume of requests to a target website. When you do this from a datacenter IP repeatedly, you stand the chance of being blocked immediately.
When using rotating residential proxies for scraping, as offered by some proxy providers, you can easily send the desired volume of requests without being blocked. Rotating IP’s means that you appear as a different customer/client every time, thus becoming untraceable and hence standing little to no chance of being blocked.
5. Avoid Blanket Bans
One of the 10 reasons for using a residential proxy for scraping web data is to avoid blanket bans. Blanket bans refer to the bans that some websites impose on an entire blanket of IPs. For example, most websites tend to blanket ban all IPs from AWS because there have been multiple cases of malicious uses overloading the websites with requests. Using a residential proxy network helps prevent blanket bans as the IPs appear to be from actual households.
6. Unlimited Concurrent Sessions
When using residential proxies for scraping web data, you might be able to concurrently send requests to one or multiple websites at once, depending on the proxy provider and its type of proxy network.
It will help you to scrape a larger volume of web data faster, proving to be effective for executing your business strategies.
7. Customer Support and High Availability
Residential proxies for scraping, or “Scraping Proxies” are usually offered by proxy providers that can afford extensive customer support and high (usually 24/7) availability. With this, you can always be on the go, scrape your data with ease, and reach out to your proxy provider in case of emergencies.
8. Rotating Proxies and Static IPs
Most residential proxy providers offer rotating residential proxies for scraping and extracting web data. With a rotating proxy, you get a new IP address based on requests, device availability (for the standard P2P proxy networks), or by setting the rotation parameters yourself. Rotating residential proxies making you even less likely to get blocked when executing multiple requests on particular websites.
Additionally, residential proxy providers also provide static residential IPs. These IPs allow you to hold a specific residential IP for as long as desired. This is beneficial for situations when you want to avoid rotating proxies for sending simple requests to target websites.
9. Large Scale Scraping
If you are a large organization with extensive web scraping needs, you can easily implement large scale scraping with residential proxies. Depending on the number of requests per hour to the target websites and the sophistication of your proxy management system, proxy providers can offer you the best large scale scraping solution by supplying residential IPs.
10. Compatibility with Automation Tools
Last but not the least of the 10 reasons for using a residential proxies for scraping web data is the compatibility with automation tools. Most residential proxy service providers offer support for automation tools. For example, if you require web scraping for SEO, residential proxy providers usually support SEO automation tools to take your web scraping needs up a notch. With the support for a variety of web scraping tools, residential proxies can serve the purpose of being the best proxies solution for your scraping needs.
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