Web Scraping|Use Proxy Server for Web Scraping

 

Web Scraper or spider becomes more and more popular in data science. This auto-technique can help us retrieve loads of customized data from the Web or database. However, the major issue is that requesting too many pages in too short a period of time by a single IP address can be easily traced by the website, thus being blocked by the target website. To limit the chances of getting blocked, we should try to avoid scraping a website with a single IP Address. And normally, we use proxy servers which include discrete proxy IP addresses whenever the requests are routed over the crawling server.

Concerned about the proxy server, the reliability of the proxy should always come first to our mind. Actually, there are around 1000 places to buy proxies and some unreliable proxies would go too fast, which might cause themselves to get blocked. There are also other approaches that can be more related to out-sourcing the IP rotation(think proxy as a service), but these services usually come at a higher cost. Since there is a cost of purchasing the proxy and the cost of re-implementing the proxy each time you purchase a new one. Much often the time, reliability does come at a cost and you will often find that "free" will be very unreliable, "cheap" will be somewhat unreliable and "more expensive" will usually come at a premium. Therefore, the Cloud-based data extraction concept is proposed recently.

The Cloud-based Web Scraping is a true Cloud-based service, it can run from any OS and any browser. We don’t have to host anything ourselves, and everything is done in the cloud. Plus, all the website page views, data formation, transformation can be handled on someone else’s server. Web proxy requirements can be managed by ourselves. On the cloud side, these machines are independent, they can be accessed and run without installing from any PC with Internet access around the world. This service will manage our data with incredible back-end hardware, more specifically, we can utilize its anonymous proxy feature that could rotate tons of IP’s addresses to prevent getting blocked by the target website. Actually, we can take a more succinct and efficient approach by using certain Data Scraper Tool with Cloud-based services, like Octoparse, Import.io these tools can schedule and run your task any time on the cloud side with tons of PCs running at the same time. Plus, these scraper tools can also provide us a fast way to manually configure these proxy servers as you need. Here is a tutorial that introduces to how to set up proxies in Octoparse.

 

Scraper site API is one of the best web scraping API that handles proxy rotation, browsers, and CAPTCHAs so developers can scrape any page with a single API call. Web scraping made easy a powerful and free Chrome extension for scraping websites in your browser, automated in the cloud, or via API