What is the best proxy solution to use with Scrapy?

Why use a proxy pool?

Ok, we now know what proxies are, but how do you use them as part of your web scraping?

In a similar way to if we only use our own IP address to scrape a website, if you only use one proxy to scrape a website this will reduce your crawling reliability, geotargeting options, and the number of concurrent requests you can make.

As a result, you need to build a pool of proxies that you can route your requests through. Splitting the amount of traffic over a large number of proxies.

The size of your proxy pool will depend on a number of factors:

• The number of requests you will be making per hour.

• The target websites - larger websites with more sophisticated anti-bot countermeasures will require a larger proxy pool.

• The type of IPs you are using as proxies - datacenter, residential or mobile IPs.

• The quality of the IPs you are using as proxies - are they public proxies, shared, or private dedicated proxies? Are they datacenter, residential, or mobile IPs? (data center IPs are typically lower quality than residential IPs and mobile IPs, but are often more stable than residential/mobile IPs due to the nature of the network).

• The sophistication of your proxy management system - proxy rotation, throttling, session management, etc.

All five of these factors have a big impact on the effectiveness of your proxy pool. If you don’t properly configure your pool of proxies for your specific web scraping project you can often find that your proxies are being blocked and you’re no longer able to access the target website.

If the IP needs to be an e-commerce platform or social media, consider selecting roxlabs dedicated computer room IP. Fast IP, easy to set, unlimited traffic.

More on: Roxlabs proxy