5 best proxy APIs for scraping. Introduction

5 best proxy APIs for scraping. Introduction

In this article, we will look at the top five proxy list websites and perform a benchmark .

If you are in a hurry and wish to go straight to the results,.

The idea is not only to talk about the different features they offer, but also to test the reliability with a real-world test. We will look at and compare the response times, errors, and success rates on popular websites like Google and Amazon .

There is a proxy type to match any specific needs you might have, and you can always start with a free proxy server. This is especially true if you want to use it as a proxy scraper.

A free proxy server is a proxy you can connect to without needing special credentials and there are plenty to choose from online. The most important thing you need to consider is the source of the proxy . Since proxies take your information and re-route it through a different IP address, they still have access to any internet requests you make.

While there are a lot of reputable free proxies available for web scraping, there are just as many proxies that are hosted by hackers or government agencies . You are sending your requests to a third-party and they have a chance to see all of the unencrypted data that comes from your computer or phone.

Whether you want to gather information through web scraping without websites tracking your bots or you need to bypass rate limits , there's a way for you to get privacy.

Proxies help keep your online activity secure by routing all of your requests through a different IP address. Websites aren't able to track you when they don't have the original IP address your request came from.

Even when you find a trustworthy free proxy, there are still some issues with using them . They could return responses incredibly slowly if there are many users on the proxy at the same time. Some of them are unreliable and might disappear without warning and never come back. Proxies can also inject ads into the data returned to your computer.

In the context of web scraping , most users start out with a free proxy. Usually you aren't sending any sensitive information with your requests so many people feel comfortable using them for this purpose. However, you might not want a website to know that you are scraping it for its data.

You could be doing market research to learn more about your competition through web scraping. You could also scrape to web for building a prospect list .

Many users don't want a website to know about that kind of activities. One big reason users turn to free proxies for web scraping is that they don't plan to do it often. Let's say you sell a software to restaurant owners. You might want to scrape a list of restaurant to gather their phone number. This is a one-time task, so you might want to use free proxies for that.

You can get the information you need from a site and then disconnect from the proxy without any issues.

While free proxies are great for web scraping, they are still unsecure . A malicious proxy could alter the HTML of the page you requested and give you false information. You also have the risk that the proxy you are currently using can disconnect at any time without warning. Also, the proxy IP address you're using could get blocked by websites if there are a lot of people using it for malicious reasons.

Free proxies have their uses and there are thousands of lists available with free proxy IP addresses and their statuses. Some lists have higher quality proxies than others and you also have the option to use specific proxy services. You'll learn about several of these lists and services to help you get started in your search for the best option for your proxy scraper.

Proxy for scraping. WHAT ARE PROXIES AND WHY YOU NEED THEM FOR WEB SCRAPING

Perhaps the simplest analogy I can use for proxy servers is that they work as a middleman between your web scraping tool and the websites it is scraping. This way, your HTTP request to any website will pass through the proxy server first and the proxy server will be the one to pass on the request to the target website using its credentials.

Learn more about proxies and how they work here.

The target website won’t have any idea that the request is coming from you or a proxy server as they will see it like any normal HTTP request. 

The main reason why you need a middleman or a go-between is to hide your scraper’s IP address from all websites to avoid getting blacklisted. The premise for needing proxies for web scraping is made up of three components:

**1. Proxies mask your scraper’s IP address: **The websites you are scraping will not see your scraping machine’s IP address since the proxy server will use its credentials when sending the request. IP masking is the primary advantage of using proxies, enabling you to remain anonymous despite all the online activities you’re doing.

**2. Proxies help you avoid IP blocking: **Since the target site can’t see your machine’s original IP address, it can’t block you if in case the machine exceeds the site’s limitations. It will block the proxy IP address instead. Although this scenario is unwanted, the good thing about it is that it’s not the scraper’s IP address that’s blocked and this can easily be remedied by switching to another proxy server.

**3. Proxies help you bypass limits set by the target sites: **Websites normally use software products that limit the number of requests a user can send in a certain amount of time. When they detect that there is an unusual number of requests coming from a single IP address, they will automatically ban that IP as it exhibits bot-like behaviour.

The limit is not so much with the number of requests per IP address but it’s with how these requests are being sent and the frequency of the requests in a short span of time. If for example, you set your scraper to obtain hundreds of data from a certain website within ten minutes, then that will raise a red flag.

Proxies can help you get around this limitation by distributing the requests among several proxies so that the target site will see that the requests came from different users. Spreading out the requests over a number of proxies will not alarm the target site’s rate-limiting software.

Generally, proxies also have benefits that you can take advantage of even when you are not scraping the web. Here is a couple of them:

1. Faster load times: Proxy servers cache data the first time you request for it. The next time a request for the same data is received, the proxy server returns the cached data, saving precious time and making load times shorter.

Источник: https://lajfhak.ru-land.com/novosti/best-web-scraping-proxies-2022-stormproxies