Thread by @robertbalazsi

Proxy Guide for Web Scraping 🥷🕷️💡

You'll learn:

✅ What are they and why use them
✅ Types of proxies
✅ Checklist for using proxies
✅ Popular proxy providers

🧵👇

🔷 What are proxies and why use them?

Proxy = 3rd-party server that routes your request through them and uses their IP address in the process, hiding yours.

Why use?

✅ Avoid IP bans
✅ Bypass rate limits
✅ Access region-specific content
✅ Improved security

🔷 Types of proxies

Datacenter (servers in data centers - duh!)
✅ cheap
❌ many IPs blacklisted
❌ IPs under the same subnet

Residential (private residences in specific ZIP codes)
✅ rarely banned
✅ variety of locations
❌ expensive

... 👇

Mobile (IPs of mobile devices)
✅ almost never banned
✅ variety of locations
❌very expensive
❌mostly for scraping pages show on mobile devices

🔷 Checklist for using proxies

1⃣ For slow rates (1 req / 2-3 sec) try without proxies
2⃣ For faster rates, if data is non-sensitive, try free proxies
3⃣ If free is no good, try datacenter IPs first, switch to residential on high failure rates
4⃣ Rotate the proxies

🔷 Popular providers

free-proxy.cz (FREE, pretty good)
brightdata.com
oxylabs.io
zyte.com
smartproxy.com

There you have it! If you liked this guide:

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