Most businesses running a data collection project start by scraping one site successfully with a simple script. Your marketing team rejoices at the success and wants to repeat this across more webpages, and with a higher frequency. Once the project is scaled up and becomes widespread, the website simply stops responding. You’ve hit a rate limit. All because you moved from scraping 10 pages a day to 10,000. The target server has automatically flagged your IP address as a bot.
Getting an Access Denied error is incredibly frustrating, and you aren’t the only one to face this struggle as you try to grow your project to help inform business-critical decisions. The fact is that the right infrastructure for a web scraping project is the solution. You have to reposition your project from a brute force attack (lots of requests, all at once) to mimicry (acting like a real internet user).
Why your small-scale methods fail under pressure
The simplest way to explain why you run into trouble when initially scaling your project is because of digital fingerprinting. Whenever you access a website, your computer communicates essential information to the server. This not only includes your IP address but also what browser and device you are using, as well as your behavioral patterns. Very quickly, a website can identify from your digital fingerprint what type of user and connection you are.
This means that if your project is using a generic Python User-Agent script, a server will instantly know your request is coming from a bot. This can be made doubly worse when you are accessing through a major datacenter, like AWS. When you opt to run a project through the best proxy provider, you can ensure that your access requests not only come from a legitimate residential IP address, but that your headers also look like they are connecting through real browsers from real locations.
A real-world analogy for this situation is if you imagine someone walking into a high-security office building. If you’re dressed appropriately for the office, walk calmly, and have a company badge, you will be able to walk right in. However, if you’re wearing gym shorts and a compression shirt, whilst running at full speed, security would stop you instantly before you can even reach the door. Most web scrapers are people in gym shorts. For success, you need your project to be appropriate for the setting.
So why does this affect the way you scale? Well, if you increase your speed without changing from a data-center connection, it is much more likely to see your project get banned because the identifiable markers raise red flags with the website’s server. Scaling requires you to be more vigilant about your connection type to ensure that every access to the target website goes through without halting your project.
The proxy hierarchy: Making the right infrastructure call
As you’ve learned, not all proxy services are created equal. Some cheap providers sell dirty IPs; those that have already been used by spammers or other scrapers before you got to them.
Datacenters are at the bottom of the hierarchy, as a cheap and easy-to-spot access node. Residential servers are genuine home network connections, costing more but giving you the security of mimicking real users.
Mobile connections are at the top of the food chain, and whilst not every project will need a real cellular server node, as they are more expensive, they can reflect the access that real people have via their mobile devices when out of the house.
Datacenter or residential connection?
Whilst connecting through a datacenter may be the fastest connection type, they are “known” by website servers as non-residential. This is the easily the most-commonly blocked IP range when a website server wants to block bots straight out of hand.
A residential connection belongs to actual internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast or Verizon and looks like regular home users to any website server that you try to access. This means your project already passes through the first gate of security.
The point of this difference is that using a residential proxy is the “invisibility cloak” that allows you to blend in with the surroundings, and you should always use them when you know the website you want to access uses aggressive anti-bot software to protect itself from many access requests.
When to use ISP and mobile proxies
Using a mobile proxy connection or an ISP proxy is crucial when you need to deploy even more advanced cloaking for your project to succeed. An ISP proxy is the best of both worlds, sitting on a datacenter server but registered to a home ISP; this makes them both extremely fast and highly trusted.
A mobile proxy uses a real 4G or 5G connection. Since thousands of real people share one specific cell tower, websites seldom block this type of IP address as they’d be blocking far too many real customers in a geographical area. Whether you choose an ISP or a mobile proxy, these are the most surgical of tools for the more difficult target websites on the hitlist for your data scraping project.
Your scraping etiquette matters much more than you think
At the end of the day, even if you have the world’s best IP address, sending 1,000 requests in a single second to a target website will make you look like a machine. This is because simultaneous access requests are like lining up an army to march through a hundred gates at once. The website views you as an incoming attack on its server. However, if you spread your requests out in a more natural flow, you can fly under the radar and not be detected at the access point.
Another thought that you may not have considered is that humans don’t click links with robotic timing. If you and a colleague both access the same website, you will take different lengths of time to click onto the next page. So instead of having your web scraping project making the next click at exactly two-second intervals, the best scraping tools add what is known as “jitter” (random pauses) to their scripts to mimic real, human browsing habits.
All of this is to say that it isn’t just about what type of connection you use to access a website, but also about how you use the proxy connections. Good internet etiquette ensures that your proxy provider doesn’t have to ban you for burning through their IP reputation, sending you back to square one for your project, and having to rebuild your entire data collection project.
The best proxy provider will offer a variety of server connection types
Ensuring you can scale your data collection project and avoiding any potential bans is about having the right tools, such as a quality proxy from BestProxy.net, as well as the right behaviour on the internet. Scale isn’t about working harder or even throwing more money at a low-quality solution. Instead, it is about working smarter by mimicking human traffic for each of your target website access requests.
The easiest place to start when debugging why your data collection project has been blocked is to check your infrastructure and see if it’s holding you back because you’re using a low-quality datacenter access point, or perhaps your residential IP cannot handle the number of requests you’re trying to make at once. Always select the best proxy provider appropriate for your project.