Ultimate Guide to proxies for Web Scraping. Why use a proxy pool?

Ultimate Guide to proxies for Web Scraping. Why use a proxy pool?

Ok, we now know what proxies are, but how do you use them as part of your web scraping?

In a similar way to if we only use our own IP address to scrape a website, if you only use one proxy to scrape a website this will reduce your crawling reliability, geotargeting options, and the number of concurrent requests you can make.

As a result, you need to build a pool of proxies that you can route your requests through. Splitting the amount of traffic over a large number of proxies.

The size of your proxy pool will depend on a number of factors:

1. The number of requests you will be making per hour.
2. The target websites - larger websites with more sophisticated anti-bot countermeasures will require a larger proxy pool.
3. The type of IPs you are using as proxies - datacenter, residential or mobile IPs.
4. The quality of the IPs you are using as proxies - are they public proxies, shared, or private dedicated proxies? Are they datacenter, residential, or mobile IPs? (data center IPs are typically lower quality than residential IPs and mobile IPs, but are often more stable than residential/mobile IPs due to the nature of the network).
5. The sophistication of your proxy management system - proxy rotation, throttling, session management, etc.

All five of these factors have a big impact on the effectiveness of your proxy pool. If you don’t properly configure your pool of proxies for your specific web scraping project you can often find that your proxies are being blocked and you’re no longer able to access the target website.

In the next section, we will look at the different types of IPs you can use as proxies.

Python Requests proxy. Подготовка запросов

При получении объектаResponseот вызова API илиSession, используется атрибутPreparedRequestфункцииrequest. В некоторых случаях над телом и заголовками (и чем угодно еще) можно будет провести дополнительную работу перед отправкой запроса. Простейший способ следующий:

s = Session ( ) req = Request ( 'POST' , url , data = data , headers = headers ) prepped = req . prepare ( ) # делаем что-то с prepped.body prepped . body = 'No, I want exactly this as the body.' # делаем что-то с prepped.headers prepped headers resp s send prepped stream stream verify verify proxies proxies cert cert timeout timeout resp status_code

Поскольку с объектомRequestне происходит ничего особенного, его можно сразу подготовить и изменить объектPreparedRequest. Затем он отправляется с остальными параметрами, которые вы бы отправили вrequests.*илиSession.*.

How to use proxy for Web Scraping. Types of proxies

For the purpose of web scraping, we can categorize proxies in four ways: by the level of anonymity, by how the IP is assigned, whether it’s dedicated or shared, and by the protocol. Let’s see each of these.

The level of anonymity of a proxy determines whether the site you’re scraping can find out whether you’re behind a proxy or even your real IP.

Proxies can be Transparent, Anonymous, or Elite.

Transparent (Level 3) proxies will always report your IP address to the target site. Technically, this means that they will set the X-Forwarded-For header to your real IP, and the Via header to the proxy’s IP.

The target site can therefore instantly see that you’re using a proxy, making this the least suitable for web scraping.

Anonymous (Level 2) proxies are better because they will not report your real IP to the site. Instead, they set the X-Forwarded-For header for either the proxy’s IP or leave it blank.

Elite (Level 1) proxies are the best for avoiding getting blocked. They don’t set either of the headers above, and they also remove other headers (such as From , Proxy-Authorization , and Proxy-Connection ) that could expose them as proxies.

Note, however, that even elite proxies can be detected in some cases. Major sites maintain large lists of blacklisted IPs and they will check your proxy against those lists. They could also check whether the port your proxy uses is a typical proxy port, like 8080 or 3128.

The second way to categorize proxies is how they get their IP addresses. We have Datacenter, Residential, and Mobile proxies. Let’s see the pros and cons of each.

Rotating proxy. Best Rotating Proxies in 2023

Here is our list of the very best rotating proxies with rotating IP addresses in 2023. It contains options that are cheap and options that are premium-priced.

1. –

If you need a proxy to handle large-scale data extraction, thenis the right choice for you.

You can choose from their extensive range of data center and residential proxies, with a proxy pool of millions of IP addresses across the world.

While a few users complain that Oxylabs is expensive compared to other proxies, there is no denying the premium service that they offer.

Even if you are scraping websites with high security, Oxylabs can assist you with a dedicated private proxy to keep your identity anonymous.

The best part about using Oxylabs is the user experience.

Their responsive team can help you find a clean proxy that is optimized for the specific site that you are scraping. Using Oxylabs can be a great option for developers who have very specialized needs.

With Oxylabs, you can also make use of additional features like a random IP proxy and a real-time crawl service.

Instead of manually getting the data from each website, Oxylabs’ crawler can automatically extract data for you in both HTML and JSON formats.

Using Oxylabs is easy, but only after you have filled out a form that pops up as soon as you try to access their proxies.

Oxylabs pricing plans are arranged in a hierarchy – if you commit to more features for a longer period of time, your subscription becomes more affordable.

Key Features

• Pay as you go from $15/GB, with no commitments. Cancel anytime.
• Unlimited concurrent sessions and proxy rotator.
• You can expect up to 99.9% uptime as Oxylabs’ team constantly monitors available proxy pools.
• A single backconnect proxy – avoid IP bans and CAPTHCAs.
• Endpoint generator.
• Integration with third-party software.
• Proxy user management with Public API
• Types of Proxies: Residential, Mobile, Rotating ISP, Shared and Dedicated Datacenter, SOCKS5, Static Residential.

: Specific use cases

Recommended Guide: Bright Data Review

For residential proxies, mobile proxies, and even datacenter proxies,provides one of the best proxy servers. Users have access to more than 70 million residential IPs across the world.

Many users complain that despite using proxy servers, they are unable to automate web browsing. Bright Data solved this problem with their preset configurations on proxy manipulation.

This means that you can enjoy features like automatic CAPTCHA solving and random header generators, without worrying about getting banned.

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.

Rotating proxies Python. How to use a Proxy with Python Requests

To use a proxy in Python, first import the requestspackage .

Next create aproxiesdictionary that defines the HTTP and HTTPS connections. This variable should be a dictionary that maps a protocol to the proxy URL. Additionally, make aurlvariable set to the webpage you're scraping from.

Notice in the example below, the dictionary defines the proxy URL for two separate protocols: HTTP and HTTPS. Each connection maps to an individual URL and port, but this does not mean that the two cannot be the same

1. Lastly, create aresponsevariable that uses any of the requests methods. The method will take in two arguments: the URL variable you created and the dictionary defined.

You may use the same syntax for different api calls, but regardless of the call you're making, you need to specify the protocol.

Requests Methods ✍️

response = requests . get(url) response = requests . post(url, data = { "a" : 1 , "b" : 2 }) response = requests . put(url, data = put_body) response = requests . delete(url) response = requests . patch(url, data = patch_update) response = requests . head(url) response = requests . options(url)

Proxy Authentication ‍

If you need to add authentication, you can rewrite your code using the following syntax:

Proxy Sessions

sessionvariable and setting it to the requestsSession()method. Then similar to before, you would send your session proxies through the requests method, but this time only passing in theurlas the argument.

Environmental Variables

If you decide to set environmental variables, there's no longer a need to set proxies in your code. As soon as you make a request, an api call will be made!

Reading Responses

If you would like to read your data:

JSON : for JSON-formatted responses the requests package provides a built-in method.