What is Scrapingant? A Website that Lets You Use Rotating Proxies with Puppeteer
Scraping is a new website that launched in beta recently. If you are someone who scrapes websites regularly, you would know how much of a pain it is to find good proxies. You go through lists after lists of proxy sites, most of which are dead or not working. Scraping allows users to create packages by combining the websites of their choice into one package and then host those packages on the scrapingant.com platform to make them accessible for everyone for free. It also provides rotating proxies, which means you can switch between different proxies with just the click of a button, so you don’t have to change your proxy every few minutes manually. So, if you are someone who frequently scrapes websites and needs good proxies, Scrapingant can be a big help for you!
How Does Scrapingant Work?
Before we talk about how Scrapingant works, we need first to understand why we need proxies to scrape websites in the first place. Scraping websites means extracting data from a website, such as a piece contact information, email addresses, phone numbers, and anything else on the website. The easiest way to do this is by using a programming language such as Python or R. You can write code that automatically downloads the website and extracts information from it. However, all websites have a function called ‘rate limiting’ that restricts the number of times they can download a website within a certain period. When you try downloading a website using code, you get a rate-limiting error and can’t access the website. The rate limiting error is put in place to prevent malicious actors from downloading masses of information from websites in a short period. As a result, it also stops people like us from trying to scrape data from websites. We need to use proxies to ‘download’ the website to avoid rate-limiting errors. Proxies are servers that sit between your computer and the website that you want to download. You tell your computer to download the website by accessing the proxy, and then the proxy downloads it and sends it to your computer. In this way, your computer doesn’t directly download the website and instead accesses the proxy. Most websites don’t track the proxy, so you don’t get rate-limiting errors as you would if you directly downloaded the website. So, you can use proxies to download the website and scrape any data from it. This is why you need proxies to scrape websites.
Why Are Rotating Proxies Important?
We have discussed how proxies help us scrape websites when we get rate-limiting errors. While proxies are great for this, rotating proxies are even better. When you are scraping websites, whether it is manually or automatically, there is a chance that you will get caught. Different websites have different ways of detecting whether someone is scraping data from their website, and if they find someone scraping their website, they will ban that person’s IP address, which is like a computer’s ID. If they ban your IP address, you won’t be able to access their website anymore. If you are scraping a website with a single IP address, like the one provided by Scrapingant, you only have one IP to use. If you get banned by that website, you will not be able to scrape any other website. This means that once you are banned, you are banned for the entire day, week, or month. In any case, you will lose a lot of time and effort. This is why you need rotating proxies. A rotating proxy means that you can use a different IP every few minutes instead of using a single IP. This means that if someone bans your IP, you can switch to another IP, and they won’t ban you again.
Why Do You Need Proxies to Scrape Websites?
We have already discussed the importance of proxies for scraping websites, but let’s go into a bit more detail on why proxies are essential. If you are scraping a website and don’t use a proxy, the website’s server will see your IP address, and they will know that you are scraping the website. If they find any malicious code in your code, they will ban your IP address, and you won’t be able to scrape their website anymore. Using a proxy for the same purpose will show the website that the data is accessed by the proxy and not your IP address. In this way, the website can’t see your IP address, and they don’t know that you are scraping the website. Thus, proxies are essential for scraping websites because they prevent the website owners from banning your IP address.
Is Scrapingant Worth Using?
Now that we have discussed the importance of proxies and rotating proxies, we can go into whether Scrapingant is a good choice or not. Scraping is a website that allows you to create packages by combining multiple or rotating proxies. You can then host these packages on their website and access them from anywhere, on any device. This means that you don’t have to manually change proxies every few minutes and switch between different proxies, which can be tedious. Instead, you can use a rotating proxy for a particular website and leave it running for hours. Scraping is an excellent platform for people who frequently scrape websites and need good proxies. If you are someone who scrapes websites regularly, Scrapingant is an excellent choice for you because it gives you access to rotating proxies for free. You can use these proxies to scrape any website and not worry about getting banned, unlike when you use a single IP address.
Conclusion
Scraping is a website that allows you to create packages by combining different rotating proxies and then host those packages on the Scrapingant platform to make them accessible. It is an excellent platform for people who frequently scrape websites and need rotating proxies to avoid getting banned.
