Proxy Comparison Tool for web Scraping. The top 5 Proxy integrations every web scraper must try

Quite frankly, when I got started —mostly trying out some scraping libraries and pieces of code I copped from Github scraping repositories — I wasn’t aware of that guideline at all. Soon enough I was hitting up the users on r/webscraping and other forums with pleas to check why am I failing to get the data that seems accessible on the websites I was targeting.

But, to my defense, as time passed, I discovered this was not entirely common knowledge, and like myself, there were many others who were crashing like waves on the walls of the website’s request rate limits, IP tagging, and more mechanisms.

So now, no longer a newbie, I feel it’s best to help others speed up the process and get to the top of the mountain faster. That is, scraping data from websites at scale.

For companies, it is sometimes more convenient to subscribe to a web scraping API or a full-service web data platform, but for us, freelancers that build custom scrapers for their clients or use them for their own business, maintaining ownership and control over the web scraper source code is highly important.

Besides that, many of us DIY programmers take pride in maintaining all dependencies within our code. Therefore, integrating proxies or a cloud proxy manager directly with our crawler or automated browser script is a must.

Bridge data Proxy. Puppeteer Proxy integration

Puppeteer is a Node library created to control and automate headless and non-headless Chrome and Chromium browsers with its high-level API. Though it wasn't originally designed to be used as a testing platform, it has become a very popular alternative to Selenium among JavaScript users and features some additional stealth extra plug-ins .

To integrate Puppeteer with Bright Data super proxies, follow these steps:

First, access your Bright Data control panel and click ‘add zone’ .
Select your preferred proxy network type - Datacenter, ISP, Residential, Mobile, etc. and click 'add zone' again.
Go to Puppeteer, add theProxy IP:Portin theproxy-servervalue, for instancezproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225.
Under thepage.authenticateinsert your Bright Data account ID and proxy zone name in theusernamevalue, this way:lum-customer-CUSTOMER-zone-YOURZONEand your proxy zone password found in the proxy zone settings.
Here is an example how what your Puppeteer code should look like:

To integrate Puppeteer with Bright Data proxy manager, follow these steps:

Access your Bright Data control panel and create a zone with the proxy network type, IP type, and number of IPs you require.
Install the Proxy Manager on your device or access it via the cloud on your Bright Data control panel.
Click ‘add new proxy’ and choose the zone and settings you require, click ‘save’ .
In Puppeteer, under theproxy-server, insert your local IP and Bright Data Proxy Manager port (i.e. 127.0.0.1:24000).
The local host IP is 127.0.0.1
Don't type username and password into the fields — the Bright Data Proxy Manager is already authenticated with the Super Proxy server.
Here is an example how what your Puppeteer code should look like:

Start using the Bright Data Puppeteer proxy integration here .

Buy Proxy. Understanding Our Proxies

Cheap Private Proxies

We allow you to rent a proxy server at an affordable price. If you are looking to buy proxy cheap, you have come to the right place. Despite our low price, we managed to give you amazing customer service and quality server hardware. That means our private proxies still outperform the ones from our competition.

Cheap Rotating Proxies

If you are looking to change the proxies you have every month, we also offer that option through our proxy rotation service. You get a fresh set of clean proxies every month for the same comfortable price. By doing it like this, we make buying cheap proxies fun and easy.

Cheap SOCKS5 Proxies

SOCKS5 proxies are exceptional because they are compatible with many more programs than proxies through IPv4. We offer a massive selection of these types of proxies, and we have professionals who can help you get set up relatively quickly. It means you can focus on making your business work instead of fighting with your proxy service.

Cheap Dedicated Proxies

We provide the option to buy cheap proxies in a way that is quite useful for people who want something dedicated. Dedicated proxies ensure that only you have access to them. It would be as if you bought your own server and set it up as a proxy. It is one of the best ways to buy cheap private proxies, and our service is quite fast and safe.

Cheap Residential Proxies

Advanced IP filtering has meant that it is a lot more difficult for people using proxies to access certain services. However, we allow you the option of getting a residential dynamic address , which is one of the best ways of guaranteeing that you can defeat the advanced IP filters currently employed by top Internet companies. You can access almost any service using these types of proxies. A residential IP gives the Internet service the impression you are browsing from a house instead of a data center .

Static IP Proxy

A static Internet address is useful for services where your IP address has to stay the same all the time. You might also want to set up advanced IP web serving, which is possible using services like Nginx. We offer the option to buy a proxy with IPv4, meaning you can access most services quite easily from your static address. It is one of the best ways to ensure compatibility with modern services.

IPv4 Proxy

A proxy with IPv4 is an excellent tool for people who don't require the advantages that SOCKS5 provides. However, it is also a lot easier to get running. That is what makes our service so exceptional. You can quickly put your proxies into your HTTP or HTTPS application and get started.

Dedicated Rotating Proxies

If you want to have dedicated proxies that rotate every month, we also offer this service. We offer it very cheaply, and it has the advantage of being backed by our commitment to only using the best server hardware. These are IP addresses that are reserved only for you, but you get a new set of them every month.

Residential Proxy. Top 25 Residential Proxies

Unlike datacenter proxies which are created from data centers/cloud servers and can easily be blocked, residential proxies are less likely to be blocked. They do a nice job of properly concealing your IP address.

The IPs are gotten via proxy from Internet Service Providers (ISP), and that makes them legit and less likely to be identified and blocked. Amongst all proxies, residential proxy stands out as the only type of proxy server that routes your traffic through computers or phones connected to typical home ISPs.

With a residential proxy, you will be visiting a website as a regular user with your IP masked behind it. This makes residential proxies highly anonymous, therefore, difficult to discover and block.

However, while some are paid, others are free. It is advisable you opt for paid proxies as the free ones do not completely guarantee the safety and security of your device.

What's the essence of proxies if they can't fully shield you from being blacklisted? After detailed research on the Internet, this article seeks to highlight the top 25 residential proxies around the globe. Let's look at them one after another.

1. Bright Data – Overall Best Residential Proxies

Bright Data is regarded as the best proxy provider because they provide some of the best proxy features and stable request proxy solutions. They have a residential IP pool size of over 72 million from over 195 countries. They have an uptime of 99.99% with a high success rate which suggests that their services are reliable.

The proxies are high rotating proxies that change IP after every request. However, you can also get sticky proxies from them to maintain seasons. It does have support for custom IP rotation, which lets you set your preferred duration, making it have the best session control system in the market. Bright Data has a 3-day money-back option and a 7-day trial.

2. Smartproxy – Fastest Residential Proxies

Smartproxy is one of the premium proxy providers in the market meant for both small and big proxy users. Pairing it with other providers in a speed test, it has proven to be the fastest residential proxy network. It has a pool size of 40 million residential IPs sourced from over 195 countries worldwide.

The service has support for protocols such as IPv4 and HTTP(S) protocol. With Smartproxy, you are guaranteed full anonymity and safety of your information, and their advanced proxy network will change proxies for every request or hold one IP from 1 to 30 minutes.

They offer a 3-day money-back option and a flexible pay-as-you-go rate of $12.5 per GB.

3. Soax – Clean Proxy Pool

Soax is known for its clean and regularly updated proxy pool with a track record of a few blocks or captcha. It has an IP pool size of over 8.5 million active residential and mobile IPs and an uptime of 99.99% for starters. It has got support for a good number of countries around the world which it provides geo-targeting for. There is no restriction whatsoever to the number of proxies you can use.

Soax boasts of a user-friendly dashboard and a result-oriented team that ensures you get the best experience. The starter monthly subscription plan comes with 8GB bandwidth and 300 ports and is sold for $99. While Soax does not offer a free trial, they do let you do a proxy test run for $1.99.

4. Rayobyte – Premium Residential Proxies

Formerly known as Blazing SEO, Rayobyte has millions of IP addresses across the world that are best suited for a good number of tasks because of their undetectable nature. The proxies are also fast, which makes them perfect for tasks that require speed.

In terms of the number of IPs in pool, there are over 10 million IPs in the pool of this provider. The pricing is cheap and based on bandwidth usage, which is like that of most providers.

Their ethical network of residential proxies is optimized for large-scale web scrapping and other projects. Yes, their name might have changed, but their quality of services remains the same, and they are regarded as one of the premium options out there.

5. IPRoyal – Affordable Rotating Residential Proxies

A statement of best proxy server is not complete without mentioning IPRoyal. They have an IP pool size of over 2 million. Their network has a pool with IPs from over 195 countries worldwide. They have an auto-rotating proxy feature that lets you choose when the IP assigned to you should be changed.

This gives them sticky session support make making them a good provider for account management. On rare occasions, you can even maintain the same IP for up to 24 hours.

The pricing for this service starts from $7/GB as there is no monthly minimum. Instead, it adopts the pay-as-you-go system, giving you the liberty to begin or stop when you want. However, the more bandwidth you pay, the cheaper the price per GB becomes.

Datacenter Proxies. Datacenter vs. Residential Proxy — An Ultimate Guide

Datacenter vs. Residential proxy both provides a method to hide your real IP address. These proxies help in scraping data from different sites without getting tracked or blocked. Well, the function of both proxies is the same, but which is best, and why? We will explain it in the later part.

Datacenter proxy and Residential proxy , both not only help in hiding your IP address but also let you access those sites which are not accessible in your country due to geographical restrictions. There are many methods to protect your original IP address, such as VPN, multiple internet connections, and proxy servers. However, if you want to use a proxy server for masking your IP address, you will find two options. Either you can use datacenter proxy or residential proxy.

Before going straight to the post, let me tell you the simple difference between Datacenter vs. Residential Proxy. Datacenter proxy hides your IP address and assigns the IP address of the datacenter whose proxy you are using. Whereas the Residential Proxy hides or replaces your original IP address with another IP of a home address, which is not your original one.

As our post title Datacenter vs. Residential Proxy suggests, we will critically differentiate both of them. Also, we will explain why you should choose a particular proxy. We will cover the main differences between the two proxies, their advantages, and disadvantages, and in the end, we will enlist some best datacenter and residential proxy providers.

Are you feeling excited? If so, then we don’t want you to wait anymore.

Here we go!

Dc Proxies. Smartproxy review — datacenter Proxies

Why datacenter proxies?

As you might know, datacenter proxies are proxies that aren’t affiliated with Internet Service Providers (ISP) and this is the main.
Datacenter proxies come from a secondary corporation (usually,from cloud server providers) and provide you with completely private IP authentication and anonymity . Because of this reason, datacenter proxies are very fast, pretty cheap (compared with residential proxies) and can be easily obtained. And, of course, they can be used for various purposes:

Web scraping — gathering data from websites isn’t an easy process and you definitely need the right knowledge and tools. Proxies are a must when it comes to web scraping because they can help you hide your IP address, change location(s) and bypass geo-restrictions so you could access the content you need. Also, proxies mask your scraping tool so it’s more difficult for the website to notice your actions on the website;
Social marketing — you can use dedicated datacenter IPs for social marketing tasks, especially when you’re using automatic tools. With DC proxies you can create multiple accounts on various social networks and use automatic software for such tasks as scheduling posts, search for relevant groups/communities to join/approach, do the keywords/hashtags research for your product, etc.
Market research — Dedicated datacenter proxies are a great tool to monitor and gather data about your competitors, be constantly updated about the overall changes in the market and track your own performance.

Web Scraping API. What is API Web Scraping (How Does it Work?)

Let’s say you’re on Amazon and you want to download a list of certain products and their prices to better tailor your business strategy. You have two options: first, you could use the same format the website you’re viewing uses, or two, you could manually copy and paste the information you need into a spreadsheet. If both of those options sound daunting and like a lot of work, you’re right. Fortunately, web scraping can make this process easier.

In short, a web scraper API is the perfect solution for any developer, digital marketer, or small business leader who is looking for a programmatic way to scrape data without any need to worry about the management of scraping servers and proxies. An API will handle all of the obscure processing stuff for you and simply funnel scraped data into your existing software programs and processes. From there, you can do whatever further data processing you need. An API can drive data-driven insights in limitless ways. Treat data as a valuable resource, use the right tools to optimize that collection process, and then you can use its value to guide your processes in whatever direction you need.

What is web scraping?

Web scraping is the process of extracting large amounts of data into a spreadsheet or another format of your choosing. In order to scrape a website, you’ll pick a URL (or several) that you want to extract data from and load it into the web scraper. Once this URL is entered, the web scraper will load the HTML code, allowing you to customize what type of data you’d like to be extracted.

For example, let’s say you sell camping gear and you want to extract all of the products and their prices from your competitor’s website for the same kind of products but you want to omit the excess information like reviews and other information you don’t need. All you’d have to do is filter out what you don’t want to be included and the web scraper will compile a list containing only the information you need. This is where API comes in.

What is API?

Application programming interface (commonly abbreviated as API) allows two different types of programs to talk to one another. An API is a computing interface that simplifies interactions between different pieces of software you use APIs every single day. Chatting with someone through social media and even checking your daily email on your iPhone are both common examples of how an API works. In the case of our web scraping API, you can use a piece of software to send a request to our API endpoint and execute a web scraping command, as defined in the documentation . Users can submit a web scraping request and get the data they need immediately – 60 seconds to be exact – and have it organized and downloaded in their preferred format, all of which is done in real-time.

Scrapy Proxy rotation middleware. Customization

rentier-scrapy-proxy-rotatorkeeps track of working and non-working proxies, and re-checks non-working from time to time.

scrapy-rotating-proxiesuses a simple heuristic: if a response status code is not 200, response body is empty or if there was an exception then proxy is considered dead. ROTATING_PROXY_BAN_POLICYoption, e.g.:

# settings.py ROTATING_PROXY_BAN_POLICY = 'myproject.policy.MyBanPolicy'

The policy must be a class withresponse_is_banandexception_is_banmethods. These methods can return True (ban detected), False (not a ban) or None (unknown). It can be convenient to subclass and modify default BanDetectionPolicy:

# myproject/policy.py from rotating_proxies.policy import BanDetectionPolicy class MyPolicy(BanDetectionPolicy): def response_is_ban(self, request, response): # use default rules, but also consider HTTP 200 responses # a ban if there is 'captcha' word in response body. ban = super(MyPolicy, self).response_is_ban(request, response) ban = ban or b'captcha' in response.body return ban def exception_is_ban(self, request, exception): # override method completely: don't take exceptions in account return None

Instead of creating a policy you can also implementresponse_is_banandexception_is_banmethods as spider methods, for example:

class MySpider(scrapy.Spider): # … def response_is_ban(self, request, response): return b'banned' in response.body def exception_is_ban(self, request, exception): return None

It is important to have these rules correct because action for a failed request and a bad proxy should be different: if it is a proxy to blame it makes sense to retry the request with a different proxy.

Non-working proxies could become alive again after some time.scrapy-rotating-proxiesuses a randomized exponential backoff for these checks - first check happens soon, if it still fails then next check is delayed further, etc. Use ROTATING_PROXY_BACKOFF_CAP.