Why you need proxies for web scraping from buzai232's blog

Why you need proxies for web scraping

Before we begin, take a look at this short video - it's the scene from Harry Potter where he gets The Invisibility Cloak. It’ll help us better understand the concepts behind proxies.To get more news about socks5, you can visit pyproxy.com official website.

What is a proxy in web scraping?
Before you go and create your perfect proxy network, it's important to know what a proxy really means in web scraping terms? Once you know what it is, it will be obvious how it helps avoid the blocks.

Recall your networking class, an IP Address knows two things about you - your location and your Internet Service Provider. This is the reason why some over-the-top content providers can block certain content based on your geographical location. Voila, proxy!

A proxy is the invisibility cloak that hides your IP, so you can access the data seamlessly without getting blocked. When using a proxy, the website you are requesting no longer sees your IP address but the IP address of the proxy, giving you the ability to scrape the web with higher security.
Why is a proxy server used?
Going back to the video we watched earlier, a proxy server is the one who supplied this invisibility cloak to Harry. This intermediary server sits between you and the website. A proxy server assigns you a proxy, often from a pool of proxies, to seamlessly crawl the web. A proxy server handles your internet traffic on your behalf.
Why do you need proxies for web scraping?
Why is proxy the buzzword when it comes to web scraping? Well, scraping a well-designed and well-protected website at a medium to large scale could be quite challenging. The HTTP/HTTPS requests sent to the webserver can be blocked for various reasons. Remember the 4xx and 5xx status code responses you get while crawling the most visited e-commerce websites?

The most obvious reasons for these blocks could be

IP Geolocation: My favorite movie, The Lord of the Rings is not available on Netflix India. Now if the website recognizes you as someone trying to scrape content not available in your region or as a bot, they might not allow you to crawl their website to avoid overloading servers. If you really need that data for market research of your product or understanding how a new product feature is working in a particular region, you’d be in a real fix!

IP rate limitation- Almost every well-designed website has set certain limits on the number of requests they can allow from a single IP. Once you cross the threshold, you will get an error message and might even have to solve a Captcha so the website can distinguish between human and non-human activity. So beware before you send out thousands of requests to scrape an e-commerce website for your next price prediction campaign.