To get an idea of what a proxy is, you need to understand what an IP address is. It is a unique address associated with every device that connects to the Internet Protocol network like the Internet. For instance, 123.123.123.123 is an example of an IP address. The numbers can range from 0 to 255 (i-e, from 0.0.0.0 to 255.255.255.255). These numbers are not random; rather, they are mathematically generated and allocated by IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority).
You can consider a proxy as an intermediate connection point between the user and the target website. Each proxy server has its IP address, so when a user requests via a proxy to access a website, the website sends the data to the proxy server IP that forwards it to the user.
It’s an inefficient practice to scrape the web using a single proxy as it limits the number of concurrent requests and the geo-targeting options. If your proxy gets blocked, you can’t use it again to scrape the same website. The size of the proxy pool may differ based on the following aspects.
Given below are some benefits of using proxies for web scraping.
Below are the aspects of setting up proxy management.
In-house proxies provide complete control to the involved engineers and ensure data privacy. But it takes a lot of time to build an in-house proxy. Thus, you need an experienced engineering team for building and maintaining the proxy solution. Therefore, many businesses prefer to use off-the-shelf proxy solutions.
Different web scraping proxies depend on the IP type. The multiple types of IP proxies are:
These Internet protocols come from the cloud servers and possess the same subnet block range as the datacenter. Thus, they can be easily detected and are not affiliated with an ISP (Internet Service Provider). These proxies are the most commonly used because they are the cheapest to buy compared to other proxies. They can function adequately with the proper proxy management.
Residential IPs are the internet protocols of a person’s network. They are more expensive than the datacenter IPs, so it can be challenging to acquire them. The datacenter proxies achieve the same results and do not violate someone’s property. Though they are cost-efficient, they have a problem accessing the geo-restricted content.
On the contrary, the residential proxies are less likely to get blocked by the websites you scrape. The residential IPs are the legitimate IP addresses coming from an Internet Service Provider and can be effectively used to access the geo-restricted content worldwide.
The mobile proxies are pretty expensive and even more challenging to obtain. Usually, it is not recommended to use mobile proxies unless you need to scrape results to show to the mobile users exclusively.
It can be pretty time-consuming to manage a proxy pool on your own. What about using an API?
If you use an API, you do not need to worry about:
A well-developed API can manage features like:
You may need to invest in a monthly subscription to use the services of an API. But it saves money and time than doing it yourself. It would be a more efficient approach to use a pre-built API. Some APIs can also do web scraping for you apart from managing proxies.
