Web Scraping at Scale with our proxies

Different websites demand different proxy types. Picking the wrong one means burning money on blocks or overpaying for capacity you don't need.

Here's the decision framework we recommend to our customers:

When to use them:

- Scraping sites protected by Cloudflare Bot Management, DataDome, or PerimeterX
- Collecting public data from social media platforms (LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook)
- Price monitoring on major e-commerce sites (Amazon, Walmart, Target)
- Any target where datacenter proxies get instantly blocked

What to expect: Our rotating residential proxies pull from a pool of IPs across multiple countries. Each request can come from a different address, or you can lock a session to one IP for multi-page flows like pagination or authenticated scraping.

The cost tradeoff: Residential proxies are priced per GB of bandwidth because the IP pool is maintained through real users. If you're running headless browsers (Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium), that bandwidth adds up fast - every page load pulls CSS, JavaScript, images, fonts. For cost control, prefer HTTP-level scraping with tools like Python's requests or httpx wherever possible. A request that costs 2MB through Playwright might cost 15 KB with a direct HTTP call.

ISP proxies sit between residential and datacenter. They're hosted in data centers but registered to internet service providers, so IP databases classify them as residential. You get datacenter speed and uptime with residential-level trust.

When to use them:
- Long-running scraping jobs where you need the same IP for hours or days
- Targets that block datacenters but don't use advanced fingerprinting
- Account management tasks that need consistent IP identity
- When residential bandwidth costs are too high for your data volume

Why we recommend them often: Most scraping projects don't actually need full residential proxies. If the target site just checks whether your IP belongs to a data center, ISP proxies pass that test at a fraction of the cost. We've seen customers cut their proxy spend by 40-60% switching from residential to ISP proxies for targets that don't use behavioral fingerprinting.

Datacenter proxies are the most affordable option and the fastest. They run on servers in professional data centers, which means consistent latency and high throughput.

When to use them:
- Scraping sites with no anti-bot protection or only basic rate limiting
- Internal tools, APIs, and structured data sources
- High-volume jobs where cost per request matters most
- SERP scraping (Google, Bing) with proper rotation

The catch: Any serious IP database will identify these as datacenter addresses. Sites with modern anti-bot stacks will block them quickly. But plenty of scraping targets — government databases, real estate listings, job boards, product feeds — don't use those systems. For those targets, datacenter proxies are the smart play.

We sell dedicated datacenter proxies that are yours alone. No shared usage, no neighbor getting your IP banned.

Rotation is a strategy, not a proxy type. It can be applied on top of residential, ISP, or datacenter proxies. Each request (or each session, depending on your config) goes through a different IP address. This is what you want for large-scale scraping where you're making thousands or millions of requests.

Our rotating proxy infrastructure handles the rotation logic for you. You connect to a single gateway endpoint, and the system assigns a fresh IP per request or maintains a sticky session for a configurable time window.

Most people get this backwards. They start with residential proxies and headless browsers, then wonder why their bill is through the roof.

Start cheap. Scale up only when something breaks.

Start with cURL and shared proxies. Before writing any code, test your target:

If you get the HTML you need, you're done. Shared proxy, shell script, move on.

Upgrade your tools only when forced. The escalation path:

1. cURL / wget → for testing and one-off grabs
2. Python requests / httpx → when you need parsing and session management
3. Scrapy → when you need concurrency and crawl pipelines
4. Playwright / Puppeteer → only for JS-rendered content that doesn't exist in raw HTML

Each step up burns more CPU, memory, and proxy bandwidth. A Scrapy spider on a $5 VPS can pull a million pages a day. The same job through Playwright needs a $40 server and 10-30x more bandwidth.

Upgrade your proxy type only when the cheaper one fails:

1. Shared proxies → pennies, try first
2. Dedicated datacenter → your own IPs, still cheap
3. Rotating datacenter → more IPs in the cycle
4. ISP proxies → residential trust at datacenter speed
5. Rotating residential → heavy artillery, last resort

Scaling a scraping operation isn't just about buying more proxies. The failure modes change as you grow.

At 1,000 requests/day

Almost anything works. A few dedicated datacenter proxies with basic rotation will handle most targets. You don't need sophisticated tooling — a Python script with requests and a proxy list is enough.

At 100,000 requests/day

You'll start hitting rate limits even with rotation. This is where you need:

- Smart rotation that distributes requests across your IP pool evenly
- Backoff logic that detects soft blocks (CAPTCHA pages, redirects to bot-check pages) and retries with a different IP
- Session management for multi-step scraping flows
- Request spacing that mimics human browsing patterns

Our rotating proxy gateway handles the first two. You focus on your scraping logic; we handle IP distribution.

At 1,000,000+ requests/day

At this scale, proxy management becomes infrastructure engineering. You need:

- Multiple proxy types working in synergy (datacenter for easy targets, residential for hard ones)
- Geographic distribution matching your target's server locations
- Bandwidth optimization (HTTP-level scraping instead of headless browsers where possible)
- Monitoring to catch IP pool degradation before it tanks your success rate
- Concurrent connection management to avoid overwhelming any single proxy

We work with customers at this scale. Our infrastructure supports thousands of concurrent connections, and our team can help architect a proxy strategy for your specific targets.

"I'm getting blocked after a few hundred requests"

You're likely using the same IP too frequently. Switch to rotating proxies and add 2-5 second delays between requests. If the target uses Cloudflare, move from datacenter to residential or ISP proxies.

"Pages load but the content is empty"

The site renders content with JavaScript. You need a headless browser (Playwright or Puppeteer), not just an HTTP client. Connect it through our proxies the same way — see the setup guides above.

"My proxy works in the browser but not in my script"

Check your TLS fingerprint. Python's requests library has a different TLS fingerprint than Chrome. Tools like curl_cffi or tls-client can mimic browser TLS fingerprints while keeping the bandwidth advantage of HTTP-level scraping.

"Rotating proxies are slow"

Latency varies by proxy type. Residential proxies route through consumer connections, so expect 200-800ms per request. Datacenter proxies run at 50-150ms. ISP proxies sit around 100-300ms. If speed is critical and your target allows it, use datacenter.

"I need the same IP for multiple requests"

Use sticky sessions. Our rotating proxy gateway supports session duration from 1 minute to 30 minutes. Send a session ID with your request, and all traffic with that ID routes through the same IP.