In this article we present Smartproxy, one of the best web proxy services in the world that allows, among other things, to do web scraping in total safety and without the risk of being blocked. Let's see the details
Smartproxy is one of the best proxy services in the world that offers well 4 different types of proxy services to be used (e.g. residential proxies referring to private IPs and different types of IPs for datacenters) covering a total of 40 million IP addresses distributed in over 195 different countries and divided into about 100 subnets. Smartproxy also offers a 24-hour customer service that responds in a few minutes and is therefore also suitable for professionals and companies. The IP addresses of the proxies can be randomized among about 24 alternatives and with a very short access time, less than 40.000 seconds. But let's see in more detail how Smartproxy can be used for web scraping.
What is a web proxy?
The proxy or web proxy is nothing more than an intermediate server located between the client and another server. Typically the latter contains the content that was actually requested by the client. However, the request is not sent directly to the destination server, but first passes through the proxy which performs a sort of pre-processing.
The use of web proxies found multiple applications over time. A trivial example is that of firewall which protects a server. All requests go through the proxy and are analyzed before being forwarded to the server in order to avoid damage to the sensitive data contained in it. Proxies are also often used to avoid congesting servers. In fact, they can contain a cached copy of the data and distribute them to clients without asking the server each time. This greatly speeds up the management of requests that can be decentralized and distributed all over the world.
A proxy could also be used for filter requests, both inbound and outbound. Many organizations such as schools or businesses use proxies to filter some content through a blacklist of URLs or keywords. In these cases, by passing the requests through a proxy and authenticating on it, thus verifying one's identity, it is possible to access and use these filtering services. Or you can do it sorting according to the type or origin of the request.
Conversely, a proxy can also be used for evade filters and censorship. In fact, many filters use the IP of origin of the request to censor incoming and outgoing contents. A proxy can be used which simply forwards the request to the server and then forwards the response to the client that originally produced it. If the proxy is in uncensored territory, there will be no problem. In this context, thanks to web proxies, it is also possible protect your privacy hiding their identity. In fact, the proxy can hide the IP of the client that forwarded the request. This way, for the receiving server, the request will appear to actually originate from the proxy and the client's identity will remain anonymous.
Proxies can also be used to customize the content displayed. For example, they can translate a website depending on where the request came from. But they are also used for something much more annoying. In fact, even the advertisements can be customized by a proxy according to the request that has been previously analyzed.
What is web scraping?
Web scraping generally refers to the activity of analyze and collect data on the web, using the HTTP protocol and simulating the behavior of a human being who browses. Generally web scraping takes place using bots, ie programs that analyze the contents of web pages automatically to receive information. For example, this technique is used by search engines to rank pages and create search results. Recently, however, they are also used to collect large amounts of data to train models or perform analyzes. Many information aggregators and services such as Booking.com use web scraping.
Web scraping is usually based on the parsing the HTML code of the page from which a lot of information can be obtained from the contents of the hypertext links.
Why is Smartproxy useful to stem web scraping?
How to use Smartproxy to avoid web scraping? Servers often have protections that block large amounts of requests coming from the same IP in a very limited amount of time. But that doesn't completely solve the scraping problem. Using a web proxy instead yes. Smartproxy offers a series of very useful services, such as IP address rotation, to avoid the annoying problem we were talking about earlier. The performance guaranteed by the Smartproxy proxy network is also excellent with minimal delays, and the ability to simulate desktop devices that regardless of their origin in the world. In short, thanks to Smartproxy, there will be no limitations in limiting the activity of bots on the web.
The Smartproxy website offers different plans to meet various needs, starting at a cost of around $ 75 per month (excluding taxes) for a traffic of 5 GB. But it's not just about the amount of GB. In fact, the plans have also been designed based on the final application. We have plans for residential or datacenter proxies, anonymous or transparent proxies. We also have plans designed for details and applications, such as search engines or reselling services. But if none of the alternatives suits you, you can also ask for a personalized plan suited to your specific needs.
In short, Smartproxy is an absolutely professional and powerful service. One of the best in the world. Payment methods are very flexible and PayPal and Bitcoin are also accepted. It is an absolutely reliable and indispensable tool for many applications. That's all from the web and social section, keep following us!
