The best proxy APIs for web scraping. ScrapingBee review

The best proxy APIs for web scraping. ScrapingBee review

I know I know… It sounds a bit pushy to immediately talk about our service but this article isn't an ad. We put a lot of time and effort into benchmarking these services, and I think it is fair to compare these free proxy lists to the ScrapingBee API.

If you're going to use a proxy for web scraping, consider ScrapingBee. While some of the best features are in the paid version, you can get 1,000 free credits when you sign up . This service stands out because even free users have access to support and the IP addresses you have access to are more secure and reliable.

The features ScrapingBee includes in the free credits are unmatched by any other free proxy you'll find in the lists below. You'll have access to tools like JavaScript rendering and headless Chrome to make it easier to use your proxy scraper.

One of the coolest features is that they have rotating proxies so that you can get around rate-limiting websites. This helps you hide your proxy scraper bots and lowers the chance you'll get blocked by a website.

You can also find code snippets in Python, NodeJS, PHP, Go, and several for web scrapers. ScrapingBee even has its own API, which makes it even easier to do web scraping. You don't have to worry about security leaks or the proxy running slow because access to the proxy servers is limited.

You can customize things like your geolocation, the headers that get forwarded, and the cookies that are sent in the requests, and ScrapingBee automatically block ads and images to speed up your requests.

Another cool thing is that if your requests return a status code other than 200, you don't get charged for that credit. You only have to pay for successful requests.

Even though ScrapingBee's free plan is great, if you plan on using scraping websites a lot you will need to upgrade to a paid plan. Then of course, if you have any problem you can get in touch with the team to find out what happened.

With the free proxies on the lists below, you won't have any support. You'll be responsible for making sure your information is secure and you'll have to deal with IP addresses getting blocked and requests returning painfully slow as more users connect to the same proxy.

Scraper api. Async Requests Method

To ensure a higher level of successful requests when using our scraper, we’ve built a new product, Async Scraper. Rather than making requests to our endpoint waiting for the response, this endpoint submits a job of scraping, in which you can later collect the data from using our status endpoint.

Scraping websites can be a difficult process; it takes numerous steps and significant effort to get through some sites’ protection which sometimes proves to be difficult with the timeout constraints of synchronous APIs. The Async Scraper will work on your requested URLs until we have achieved a 100% success rate (when applicable), returning the data to you.

Async Scraping is the recommended way to scrape pages when success rate on difficult sites is more important to you than response time (e.g. you need a set of data periodically).

How to use

The async scraper endpoint is available athttps://async.scraperapi.comand it exposes a few useful APIs.

Rotating proxy. What is a Rotating Proxy?

A rotating proxy is a proxy server that automatically rotates your requests amongst a massive IP proxy pool every time the you make a new connection to the proxy server. Using this approach, you don’t need to build and maintain your own proxy rotation infrastructure on your end. Instead, you can just send your requests to the proxy server and it will use a different proxy with every request. Ensuring that you aren’t constantly using the same proxies to make requests to the target website.

Using a rotating proxy like this makes it easier to simulate many different users connecting to an online service or website instead of multiple requests from a single user. Enabling you to bypass even relatively advanced anti-bot systems and still get the successful responses you need to scrape your target data. And even if one IP does get blocked, your next connection request will have a different IP and most likely will be successful.

The rotating proxy technique can be implemented with both dedicated/datacenter proxies as well as residential proxies. Although the latter will be even more effective, using rotating proxies with either will dramatically increase your success rate when running web scraping, or other similar, tools.

If you are looking for a rotating proxy solution then be sure to give ScraperAPI a try by signing up to a free trial with 5,000 free requests . Not only is ScraperAPI a rotating proxy solution that automatically rotates your requests amongst a proxy pool with over 40M proxies, it also automatically uses the best header configuration for your target website and handles all bans and CAPTCHAs thrown by a sites anti-bot system.