Have you ever wanted to get into web scraping for any particular reason in the past or even present? If you have, you’d be presented with a variety of approaches to web scraping, some of these approaches could be any of the following:
- Use of browser extension web scrapers.
- Build/write your own web scraper (this would require you to have your own proxies and other infrastructures).
- Out source to third party web scraping tools such as Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl).
Any of these options could be good or even perfect for your web scraping projects, truth is that would be dependent on what you’re scraping and how many times you’re going to be scraping those sites for whatever data. Now, let’s take a look at the unordered list up above again, the list is arranged from the least powerful web scraping option to the most powerful.
Obviously the use of browser extension web scrapers won’t yield same result as when you use your custom built web scraper with proxy or Proxy Crawl this is because browser web scraping extensions can’t scrape data from very dynamic and complex web sites or in very big volumes.
That being said we’re now left with making use of your own custom built web scraper with your own proxies or outsourcing your web scraping activities to a well known and trusted web scraper service such as Proxy Crawl. These last two of our list above are the essence of this blog post. Basically we’ll be partly comparing using and managing worldwide proxies (with your custom built web scraper) to using the service of Proxy Crawl web scraping tool. At the end of the day you’d see why Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) is better than using proxies while scraping or crawling the web.
Building your own web scraper either with Python or any other language of your choice and running it with your proxies which could be private, residential or whatever fancy name they’d call it, obviously seems cool and maybe cheaper depending on what you call cheap. Not until the website(s) you’re scraping decides to blacklist your proxies, block you or bombard you with lots of restrictions and CAPTCHAs, then you’d be required to continue acquiring more and more proxies to escape the blacklisting of your proxies of course this comes with maintenance of your web scraper and high proxy price to be spent.
Assuming you’d be scraping, let’s say Amazon for a long period of time, how much of your time and your money are you willing to throw into the bottomless pockets of these proxy sellers considering this would be a never ending show, at least in the nearest future? I hope you get the picture. It becomes an unending fight between you and Amazon (or any other website that you are trying to scrape).
The above paragraph brings us to Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) and why it’s your ideal choice for web scraping, as it’ll definitely come to your rescue against the restrictions of these complex dynamic websites you intend scraping data from.
How is Proxy Crawl better than using your own proxies?
- It offers you complete anonymity.
- It doesn’t need you to acquire proxies.
- It doesn’t let you pass through the stress of bypassing CAPTCHAs or any other block restrictions.
- It doesn’t require you to maintain any infrastructure.
- It’s extremely fast.
- It has worldwide proxies.
- It’s a lot better than cheap proxies or free proxies.
- It combines residential and datacenter proxies.
- With Crawlbase (formerly ProxyCrawl) you won’t spend heavily on hosting your web scraper infrastructure.
- It allows you scrape virtually any kind of site.
- It allows you to scrape javascript websites.
- It lets you focus mainly on the extracted data.
- It saves you time, energy and money since the service is extremely inexpensive and seamless and the price is based on consumption.
- It even has a free account option.
Going through the above again you’d see that your custom built web scraper with proxy can barely offer you anything as good as these coupled with the stress it comes with. Working with us absolutely gives you the free time to manage and handled effectively the data being scrape. This is especially good since you don’t need to be an expert programmer to use the. Get your web scraping game on!
