Web scraping is an invaluable tool for businesses, researchers, and developers to gather vast data efficiently and at scale. Unfortunately, anti-bot measures are also getting increasingly more advanced.
Consequently, proxies are necessary, as they provide anonymity and help avoid IP blocks. The only question to be answered is whether you can rely on traditional proxies or if it’s better to use an alternative option.
Below, you’ll find the pros and cons of a traditional and web scraping proxy like ZenRows.
Web Scraping with Traditional Proxies
For many years, traditional proxies were a reliable option for web scraping. They act as a middleman between the client and the website server, rerouting your requests to hide your IP. That gives them specific advantages like anonymity, IP rotation options, and access to geo-restricted content.
Namely, by hiding your IP, proxies ensure your scraping activities can’t be traced back to you. They also allow you to distribute the requests among different IPs to ensure your scraper doesn’t trigger any rate limiting or IP bans. You can get an IP to extract location-specific data by choosing from a pool of worldwide servers.
On the other hand, these proxies have limitations. The quality varies significantly across providers, and you’ll need time and effort to find fast and reliable solutions. Furthermore, if you need a larger number of proxies from different locations, that will become a costly endeavor.
And finally, one of the biggest concerns is that advanced anti-bot measures can detect and block traditional proxies, which defeats the purpose of using them for web scraping. Fortunately, there’s an alternative option that yields better results.
Web Scraping Proxies
Web scraping proxies offer a better-performing solution at a lower cost than traditional proxies. Here are some of the options you have:
Residential Proxies
Residential proxies are becoming increasingly popular for web scraping projects. Unlike their traditional counterparts, which are usually data center-based, residential IP addresses are assigned to home devices. That makes them much more reliable and less likely to get detected and blocked.
High anonymous proxies offer the utmost level of anonymity and security. They don’t add identifying information or proxy headers to the HTTP request, so websites can’t detect you using a proxy. They also have an extra security layer, protecting all personal information to ensure your scraping activities aren’t linked to you.
CAPTCHA Proxies
CAPTCHA proxies are designed to bypass CAPTCHA systems and access target websites. They’re convenient for large-scale scraping projects that require you to send out many requests. Their advantages include high page load speed and different rendering options.
These are just a few reliable alternatives to traditional proxies. While they can ensure the success of your web scraping project, they’re usually costlier.
Choosing Web Scraping vs. Traditional Proxies
When deciding between traditional and web scraping proxies, you should consider several primary factors:
- Use cases: Every project has specific requirements, like scraping large amounts of data or targeting websites with advanced security. Once you evaluate your needs, you’ll know whether traditional proxies will suffice or you’ll need to upgrade.
- Reliability: As mentioned, finding a trustworthy traditional proxy service that isn’t likely to get blocked can be tricky. Web scraping proxies, on the other hand, offer more security and techniques to ensure websites won’t detect you’re masking your IP.
- Budget: Whether you’re going with traditional or alternative proxies, you’ll find provider’s offers can differ significantly in price. Make sure you carefully evaluate the pros and cons of each option to find the most cost-effective solution.
- Technical expertise: You’ll need to consider the required technical knowledge for implementing and managing each option. Working with traditional proxies may be easier, while the more advanced options can require additional configurations or integrations.
Overall, the choice depends on the specifics of your projects, but in most cases, you’ll find web scraping proxies to be the more efficient solution. They’ll save you a lot of time and resources figuring out how to bypass anti-bot detection systems and avoid blocks.
Conclusion
In the web scraping world, every tool is in constant development and improvement. Similarly, the traditional proxies you’ve relied on for so long can’t handle the obstacle anti-bot measures pose. That’s why newer and better alternatives are coming along.
To simplify the process, web scraping APIs like ZenRows offer the best residential and CAPTCHA proxies on the market. You can use the free 1,000 API credits you get when creating an account to test it yourself.
