How residential proxies assist web scraping

The internet we know and love today thrives on the free movement of information. The web would not be so useful and addictive if not for the constant, efficient, automated transfers of easily accessible data. This leads us to web scraping – a process that uses algorithmic automation to extract information from various sources. First used by the most popular search engines that we cannot live without today, web scraping has become a necessity for ambitious businesses striving for success.

Although data aggregation can help a company in many different ways, without proper regulation, scraping bots can push for unreasonable levels of efficiency, making your extraction operations much more visible and dangerous. Once a competitor or other third party identifies your main IP, you will most likely get banned. Getting your address, or worse – your company’s address blacklisted can really hurt your brand. But how do we use web scraping without backfire?

Luckily, we have great tools that help us preserve anonymity on the internet – residential proxies. If you get a reliable intermediary server from a legitimate proxy provider, automated data gathering becomes much more safe and efficient. Even if you try to get the most out of your scraping bots to guarantee a competitive advantage, your network identity will remain hidden.

But why do we have to use residential proxies? The answer is quite simple: free public proxies are extremely unsafe for business operations and tasks with personal data, while most datacenter proxy IPs are already identified and banned on numerous sites. Residential proxy IPs come from real mobile and desktop devices. They provide a much higher quality data access.

You can find many best residential proxy lists that will assist you in web scraping. Smartproxy is a great proxy provider with great tutorials and affordable deals for both beginners and advanced users. If you want to learn more about the tools that help you scrape the web, check out this legitimate proxy provider.

In this article, we will address the ways a residential proxy can amplify your scraping operation. Follow these tips and your data extraction tasks will help you stay ahead of the competition. Information is an immensely valuable resource that accelerates advancements in every field of our lives. That makes it necessary to learn the tips and tricks of safe and efficient data collection.

Choose your scraping bot and support it with residential proxies

Every scraping operation starts with choosing a scraping bot that suits your needs. If you are trying to learn about data extraction, we advise you to use Scrapy or other free Python frameworks to get comfortable and familiar with data extraction. Once you get the hang of these tools, you can start testing free trials of advanced scraping bots that you plan to use in the future business environment.

Testing your system on scrape-friendly websites is a piece of cake, but once you move to secure websites, you must have a good residential proxy provider by your side. Some pages have protections that can recognize and ban repetitive, inhuman behavior, so it would be in your best interest to cover yourself with a residential proxy to find the optimal scraping setup and not get banned.

Of course, although we chose to focus on the tools that boost scraping, let’s not forget about the other side of the fence. While you are planning to target your competitors and extract their public data, it is very likely that your website is already a target of scraping. We recommend using residential proxies from a legitimate proxy provider to set up reverse proxies that help to reduce the main server load and set up a Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption. Do not about your defense, or you’ll pay a dear price for it!

Can residential proxies help you earn more money?

When we use residential proxies, profits from web scraping operations increase by 300% due to higher quality data and faster data acquisition. These networks are at least 2,000% larger than data center proxy networks, which makes them have a global reach for penetrating the truly global data market that’s valued at upwards of $36 billion. While a lot of businesses engage in some form of web scraping themselves, a lot of companies do not possess the necessary skills to maximize the benefits of web scraping. When their for-profit activities have little to nothing to do with IT, these businesses can struggle in a modern market. Thankfully a high demand for proxy-related services has allowed tech-savvy individuals to create companies that help their partners thrive while making money with proxies.

Server load testing

Distributed Denial of Service attacks (DDoS) is a very common way to sabotage, slow down, or even crash a website. Page owners that are scared of potential cyberattacks can pay for server load testing.

This legal procedure is a great way to test the website’s endurance against attacks masked with residential proxies. With good coding skills and a proxy provider at your disposal, you can charge other businesses for testing their systems.

Manage a social media campaign

While some up-and-coming businesses have a good product that should help them build a loyal client base, some companies never get the attention they deserve due to a lack of social media recognition. There are several techniques that use web scraping and residential proxies to boost social media accounts.

Because Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media websites have become the main platforms for business advertisement, companies use web scraping to find the best influencers to promote their products, and residential proxies to avoid bans.

You can also use many proxy IPs simultaneously to manage a bot army that will help you build the following of your social media account. As long as you can simulate believable human behavior, your system will remain undetected while your following grows. Even if you slip up and your account gets banned, it will never get traced back to your main IP. Once you learn to use residential proxies, they will serve you as extremely versatile tools that can assist a lot of web tasks.