Risks of Web Scraping Without Proxy

Headline: If you want to undertake web scraping activities successfully, then you need to incorporate proxies. But what will be the consequences of not using proxies when doing web scraping. This article explains the risks associated with web scraping with a proxy.

The internet is packed with useful data that can give you a competitive advantage in the market when well implemented. Web scraping helps businesses in the e-commerce space to collect data that will give them insights into the market. However, for web scraping to be successful, proxies should be integrated.

This article will discuss what web scraping is and the risks of not relying on proxies during web scraping.

What is Web Scraping?

Web scraping, which is also known as web harvesting, is a method of extracting large volumes of relevant data from websites. Most large companies use web scraping to collect and store various types of data like pricing, product reviews, data mining, web indexing, and many more.

The data that they collect is a crucial part of business intelligence and plays a major role in the decision-making process. Therefore, if you are an e-commerce company and you want real-time access to user data from the World Wide Web (WWW), a web scraper can come in handy.

What Are Proxies and Why are They Useful for Web Scraping?

A proxy server is an IP address that serves as a middle man between the client and the other websites. Proxies hide the real IP address of your company’s network and give you a new IP address. This way, you can scrape the web without the website you are making requests to seeing your real IP address.

Since web scraping is prone to IP blocking and geo-restrictions, proxies can hide your real address so you don’t get banned. The commonly used proxies for web scraping are residential. A residential proxy uses an IP address for the Internet Service Provider and not from the data center. Hence, it can help you scrape large amounts of data without getting banned.

Risks of Using Web Scrapers without Proxy

1. Your IP Address Can Get Blocked

Web Scraping involves sending requests to other servers. A proxy acts as an intermediary that masks your real IP address and lets you create a series of IP addresses that you can use randomly to send requests.

However, you will be forced to use the same IP to send all your requests without a proxy server. However, you are likely to get blocked on a site that recognizes that several requests come from a single IP address.

2. Prone to Hacking

Proxies provide an extra layer of protection for your website against hacking. In the event of hacking, the hackers will not get the real data but only the proxy. However, not using proxies puts you at risk of hacking when web scraping other websites.

3. Geo-Restrictions

If your company is looking to get into a particular market like India, you may encounter regional restrictions without a proxy. This is true if you are trying to scrape information from websites of companies that have geo-blocked their content, meaning that they only allow people from the region to access it.

But this would not be an issue when you use an Indian proxy. Using a residential proxy will allow the web crawler to bypass these restrictions and give you access to the region-specific content. It tricks the other website to believe that the requests are from the same region, lowering the chances of getting banned. If you are interested in how to avoid geo-restrictions, read more about India proxy.

4. Limited Scraping

Web scrapers that do scraping in high volume are more likely to be tracked compared to scrapers with less activity. This can happen when the scraper accesses the same website too quickly or at certain time intervals every day. In such an event, websites think that they are being visited by a bot rather than an actual user.

On the other hand, using proxies offers anonymity during web scraping. Hence, web scrapers can do high-volume scraping concurrently without getting detected or banned. It can work more and make a large number of requests without stopping.

5. Unreliability

Using a proxy will allow you to web crawl or scrape a website more reliably. However, when you don’t use a proxy, you will encounter various issues during scraping and even increase the chances of your spider getting blocked.

Besides, when you don’t use an Indian proxy or any other proxy, your web scraper will move slowly and stop working when blocked. But when you have a proxy server, you can change the proxy server if it gets blocked. Hence, you can continue scraping to get the necessary data and your productivity will remain high.

6. Slow Load Times

With proxy servers, you will get to enjoy faster load times since they cache data when you first request it. This will make the load times shorter and save you time when you request the same data. However, this may not be the case when you don’t use proxy servers.

Conclusion

In the dynamic world of business, making better and informed decisions is crucial if you want to meet your goals and ensure continuous success. Your company can greatly benefit from integrating proxies into the web scraping process to retrieve useful data.

As aforementioned, there are numerous risks associated with not using proxies when using a web scraper. Not only will the scraper experience IP blocking, but will also be prone to geo-restrictions and your requests will be limited and take longer to load.

However, when you use proxies, you will enjoy better security, faster load times, and you can make unlimited proxies requests. With different types of proxies available, you just need to ensure that you weigh your options and choose the most suitable for your business needs. 

also, check – Why Good Cybersecurity Starts with Great Data Management Handling