The Complete Guide to Proxy Scraping in 2024

Proxy scraping has become an essential technique for overcoming obstacles in web scraping and collecting data at scale. This comprehensive guide explores everything you need to know, from the basics of how proxies work to advanced setup and management.

What is Proxy Scraping?

Proxy scraping refers to routing your web scraping requests through proxy servers to hide your real IP address. Proxies act as intermediaries that fetch web pages on your behalf. The target website sees the IP of the proxy rather than your scraper IP.

This provides major advantages like:

Avoid IP blocks and access restrictions
Scrape data at higher speeds and volumes
Scrape region-restricted content
Reduce risk of bot detection
Remain anonymous for privacy reasons

Without proxies, sites can easily detect and block scrapers. But by constantly rotating many proxy IPs, scrapers appear as normal users.

Types of Proxies for Web Scraping

There are a few main types of proxy servers used for scraping:

Residential Proxies

Residential proxies come from regular home and mobile internet connections. The key advantage is higher anonymity since the IPs mimic real user traffic.

Downsides are slower speeds and limited control. Residential proxy providers acquire IPs by installing software on consumer devices to route traffic through them.

Oxylabs measures that over 92% of its residential IPs persist for over 30 days before being changed, indicating longevity.

Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies originate from servers hosted in datacenters owned by cloud providers like AWS.

The main benefit is lighting fast speeds, often 10-50X faster than residential proxies. However, datacenter IPs have a higher chance of being blacklisted since they are known to host proxies.

Smartproxy manages over 1 million datacenter IPs and benchmarks speeds around 1,000 ms, significantly lower latency than residential IPs.

ISP Proxies

ISP proxies stem from Internet Service Providers directly. They strike a balance between the anonymity of residential IPs and speed of datacenters.

ISPs provision large IP ranges to proxy services through business partnerships. This guarantees stable, dedicated IPs optimized for scraping.

Mobile Proxies

Mobile proxies utilize IPs allocated to cellular carriers and mobile networks.

They mimic real phone and tablet traffic, allowing access to sites blocking typical datacenters. Mobile proxies also skip browser verification processes like captcha/2FA checks that threaten scraping uptime.

GeoSurf‘s mobile proxies cover over 240 million IPs globally across 800+ operators for comprehensive scrape coverage.

Proxy Type	Anonymity	Success Rate	Speed	Cost
Residential	High	Medium	Slow	Medium
Datacenter	Low	High	Very Fast	Low
Mobile	High	Medium	Medium	High

Based on anonymity needs, scale requirements, and budgets – blends using multiple proxy types may be optimal for web scraping. Next let‘s explore top vendors to source scraping proxies.

Top Proxy Providers for Scraping in 2024

I thoroughly evaluated dozens of proxy services on criteria like locations/ASNs, success rates, latency, IP pool size and more to surface leading vendors best equipped for proxy scraping:

Bright Data

Bright Data stands at the top as a one-stop proxy solution with an immense, blended IP pool surpassing dozens of millions of IPs across all proxy types. Companies scraping vast amounts of data benefit from Bright‘s unparalleled scale.

Their GEO Surf residential proxies specificallyprovision millions of IPs optimized to sustain scrapers with minimal blacklisting. Integrated proxy manager and tools ease setup complexity.

Smartproxy

With over 40 million residential IPs covering every country and state, Smartproxy excels at anonymity for heavy scraping. The team intimately understands how to keep residential IPs "alive" through sophisticated network management.

1 million+ datacenter and 5 million ISP IPs provide versatile options. Smartproxy also offers intriguing niche proxies like Instagram and sneaker bots.

Oxylabs

Oxylabs adopts a balanced proxy approach combining over 3 million residential IPs with lightning-quick datacenter and ISP proxies for over 30 million IPs total.

This bienables both anonymous scraping at scale and unblocking of tricky sites. Oxylabs‘ prowess around residential proxies and locations like China separate them from other vendors.

GeoSurf

As a dedicated proxy service for web scraping, GeoSurf tailors everything from IP procurement to management and tooling specifically for scalable scraping.

With currently 20M residential IPs in 190+ countries and over 240M mobile IPs, GeoSurf offers tremendous coverage to extract data while averting blocks.

Make sure to trial vendors before purchasing proxies to understand performance with your unique scraper configuration and sites.

Calculating Required Proxies

The number of proxies you need for web scraping depends on:

Number of URLs/pages you are scraping
Scraping frequency – how often you crawl pages
Target site limits like requests allowed per IP

This formula estimates proxies required:

# Proxies Needed = (Total URLs) x (Scrapes/day) / (Site limit per IP)

For example, scraping 10K product pages 3 times per day when the ecommerce site allows 1K requests per IP would need minimum 30 proxies:

10,000 URLs x 3 scrapes/day / 1,000 requests/IP = 30 proxies

In practice, having 2-3x more proxies tends to ensure maximum uptime despite proxies occasionally getting banned. Proxy pools should also be large enough (1M+ IPs is best) to enable constant rotation.

Leveraging cloud computing like AWS EC2 lets you scale proxy instances on demand when scraping needs increase.

Comparing Proxy Management Approaches

Effectively setting up proxies for web scraping entails:

1. Acquiring Proxies

Proxy Services – Easiest way is purchasing proxies from vendors like above without infrastructure overhead
Self-Hosted Proxies – Manually running proxy servers and configuring scraping to use them

2. Integrating & Rotating Proxies

Configuring scrapers – Coding proxies directly into scraper logic in languages like Python
External proxy manager – Tools for automating proxy rotation, request routing and scraper integration

3. Monitoring Performance

Uptime – Measure proxy failures and blacklisting rates
Speed – Latency benchmarks to pick fastest proxy tiers
Errors – Identify issues like CAPTCHAs and blocks by site

Handling these complex tasks in-house can quickly become engineering-intensive. Tools like Bright Data‘s Proxy Manager simplify proxy management:

It provides a single dashboard to:

Integrate proxies via rotating residential/datacenter pools or IP-by-URL custom maps
Distribute requests intelligently avoiding bans
Automatically scale capacity as needed
Monitor in real-time all scraping campaigns and proxy performance
Works with any scraper through proxy API

For advanced use cases, Proxy Manager also offers a Python SDK, NLP parsing, and sandbox environments.

Removing proxy management overhead is a huge relief for data teams. But enterprises with scalable scraping infrastructure may still prefer configuring proxies internally.

Scaling Proxy Scraping With Cloud Computing

Another way to boost proxy scraping throughput is leveraging cloud platforms:

Cloud services like AWS, GCP, Azure and Alibaba Cloud provide on-demand computing:

Automatically scale instances during periods of heavy scraping
Manage high availability by distributing proxy IPs and scraper jobs across regions
Leverage tools like auto-scaling groups and load balancers
Use container orchestration like Kubernetes to simplify coordination
Push billions of proxy IPs to handle TB-level data per day

Combining proxies with cloud infrastructure takes scraping capacity to new levels.

Here is sample Python code integrating proxies when scraping with popular framework Scrapy:

import scrapy

class ExampleSpider(scrapy.Spider):
  name = ‘example‘

  def start_requests(self):

   urls = [# list of URLs to scrape]

   for url in urls:
    proxy = random_proxy() # Get proxy IP 
    yield scrapy.Request(url=url, callback=self.parse, 
                        meta={‘proxy‘: proxy}) 

  def parse(response):
    # Scraper logic handling site content
    pass

This shows how proxies can be dynamically rotated per request.

For JavaScript scraping with tools like Puppeteer, a proxy chained API handles routing traffic through constantly changing IPs.

Concurrently running this scraper across 20 cloud servers would multiply scale.

Case Studies: Companies Relying on Proxies to Scrape

Here are a few examples of organizations using proxies to overcome blocks scraping data:

Data Provider Collects 500 TB/Month

ACME Syndications provides searchable databases for research. Analysts rely on ACME having comprehensive, up-to-date industry data.

By scraping thousands of niche publications, public datasets and surveys, ACME builds profiles on companies in any sector. Without proxies, small publishers blocked ACME‘s scrapers, limiting coverage.

Now with GeoSurf‘s proxies, ACME gathers over 500 terabytes per month across 50,000 sites – allowing delivering high-value search to customers.

Headless Chrome & Proxy Combination

AllThingsTravel provides consumers travel package recommendations using AI algorithms. The startup relies on scraping search engines, review sites and travel agent content to analyze offerings.

Initially AllThingsTravel used proxyless headless Chrome browsers. But CAPTCHAs and blocks made it challenging to extract the volume of data to fuel recommendations.

By funneling Chrome through Oxylabs‘ residential proxies via Proxy-Chain library, AllThingsTravel scraped 6X more pages while staying under site radar.

Risk Analytics Dashboard

ThreatMatrix is an alternative data provider helping hedge fund clients predict movement around sensitive global events.

Analysts at ThreatMatrix track extremist web forums, ban evasion sites and dark web markets to monitor risks. Powerful content moderation and bot mitigation limited data access.

Leveraging Bright Data’s mobile and residential proxies, ThreatMatrix can now scrape risky information safely to deliver timely risk analytics.

Latest Anti-Scraping Trends

As web scraping adoption increases, sites continue inventing new defenses to protect data and infrastructure.

Common recent tactics include:

Advanced Bot Protection – Leverage fingerprinting, JavaScript analysis, behavior patterns
Shadow Banning – Allow scrapers limited access rather than full blocks
Forced Data Leaks – Trick bots into revealing information to enable tracking
CAPTCHA Outsourcing – Google reCAPTCHA and hCAPTCHA specialized mitigation
Legal Pressure – Suing scrapers under copyright claims around data ownership

Bright Data analysts observe over 60% of sites now weaponize anti-scraper technology threatening uninterrupted data collection.

Thankfully proxies provide a reliable counterbalance to innovations around bot detection and denial – especially residential mobile proxies mimicking real users.

Identifying and Preventing Proxy Detection

How are even proxies getting discovered? Common methods include:

Analyzing access patterns like frequency, velocities and flows
Tracking sites accessed from the same IPs over time
Fingerprinting request attributes and headers
Comparing IP geolocations with continents accessed

Rotating sessions intelligently among large proxy pools thwarts tracking. Mimicking organic browsing patterns also avoids triggering defenses.

Implementing robust session management and orchestration logic proves essential to proxy persistence.

Proxy Performance Benchmarks

Evaluating factors like speed, reliability and blacklisting rates allows optimizing proxies:

Key observations:

Average latency – Datacenter fastest <1s, followed by ISP and residential
Failure rates – Residential most stable with lowest discard percentage
Blacklisting – Mobile proxies face least blocks given constant IP changes

Measure your critical metrics per use case – prioritizing speed for broad crawling or anonymity for niche sites.

Combining different proxy types also nets respective advantages. Blending mobile and ISP boosts consistency for sites sensitive to datacenter IPs.

Tips for Successful Proxy Scraping

Follow these best practices when leveraging proxies for web scraping:

Test sites before large scrapes to determine limits
Calculate the proxies required and acquire more than needed as buffer
Enable automatic rotating between thousands of proxy IPs
Monitor blacklist rates and troubleshoot errors
Use multiple proxy types (residential, DC, mobile)
Utilize proxy manager solutions to offload complexity
Scrape via many concurrent threads/instances across cloud servers

Sticking to these tips will ensure your scraper can ingest the max data possible while circumventing bans.

The Future of Proxy Scraping

Proxy technology constantly advances to stay ahead of websites‘ anti-scraping defenses and ever-stricter data regulations.

Key innovations to watch include:

Expanded adoption of residential mobile devices as proxy nodes for high anonymity
Leveraging expanding 5G and IoT mobile networks to unlock 100Ms new IPs
Scraping-as-a-service solutions removing infrastructure headaches
AI-powered proxy management for automated region targeting, rotation and longevity
Support for languages beyond Python/JavaScript like R and PHP
Tighter vendor partnerships with ISPs providing dedicated scraping IP ranges

For now proxy scraping delivers immense data collection opportunities to those with proper strategies. Long term, it will only grow easier to harness proxies on-demand for frictionless web data extraction.

Final Thoughts

Mastering proxy scraping stands critical for overcoming the ongoing arms race around web data access. When implemented strategically, proxies unlock extraction potential at scales otherwise impossible.

This guide covered everything needed to successfully employ proxies for overcoming scrapers‘ greatest enemies – blocks, bans and bot mitigation.

To discuss scaling an enterprise web scraping data strategy leveraging proxies, request a consultation with our team of experts.

Additionally find more resources below to continue learning about the world of proxies.