In-House vs. Ready-Made Proxy Management?
Proxy server management is a thorn in the side of most web scrapers. Without a reliable and full-featured proxy infrastructure, you'll constantly face reliability issues and spend hours putting out proxy-related fires—a situation no web scraping professional wants to deal with.
We, web scrapers, are interested in extracting and using web data, not in managing proxy servers.
In this article, we explore the main proxy question: should you build your own proxy infrastructure or use a ready-made solution?
But first, let's talk about...
Proxy Infrastructure Requirements
While each web scraping project is different, proxy requirements are surprisingly similar. Your proxy infrastructure must be able to reliably return successful responses at the required rate. Anything less is a suboptimal proxy solution.
To achieve this, you need at least enough proxy servers to handle the required requests per minute and the ability to rotate proxies to reduce the risk of bans.
However, most web scrapers quickly discover that such a primitive proxy infrastructure simply doesn't work for any reasonable level of scaling. Very quickly, the list of requirements grows longer to ensure your scrapers can reliably extract the data they need:
- Ban Detection - Your proxy solution must be able to detect over 100 types of bans so you can identify and fix the root issue—CAPTCHA, redirects, blocks, cloaking, etc. Even more difficult, the solution must create and manage a ban database for each individual site you scrape, which is no simple task.
- Retry Errors - If your proxies encounter any errors, bans, timeouts, etc., they must be able to retry the request using other proxies.
- Request Headers - Managing and rotating user agents, cookies, etc., is crucial for proper operation.
- Session Management - Some projects require maintaining a session with the same proxy server, so you need to configure the proxy pool accordingly.
- Headless Browsers - Some web scraping projects require using headless browsers to extract target data. In this case, the proxy infrastructure must be configured to work with the chosen headless browser.
- Adding Delays - Automatically randomizing delays and varying request throttling helps conceal that you are scraping and gain access to difficult sites. Additionally, the proxy management system must dynamically choose delays based on known characteristics of the target site, and receive real-time information on optimal crawl speed to maximize request throughput without risking bans or overloading site servers.
- Geographic Targeting - Sometimes you need to configure the pool so that only certain proxies are used on specific sites.
As a result, web scrapers must develop robust management logic within their proxy infrastructure to ensure reliable IP rotation, selection of geographically specific IPs, request throttling, ban and CAPTCHA detection, retry automation, session management, user agents, and blacklist logic.
This turns a crude part of your web scraping project into a major development and maintenance effort.
Proxy Management Options: Build In-House or Use a Ready-Made Solution
When choosing a proxy management solution, you have only two options:
- Build the entire infrastructure in-house; or,
- Use a ready-made proxy management solution.
First, let's look at the first option...
Building Proxy Infrastructure In-House
Many developers new to web scraping often take the approach of building their own proxy management solution from scratch.
This approach often works well for simple sites at small scales. With a relatively simple proxy infrastructure (IP pool, simple rotation and throttling logic, etc.), you can achieve an acceptable level of reliability.
However, when scaling up web scraping or tackling more complex sites, proxy problems often arise. A heavy process of troubleshooting proxy issues, obtaining additional IP addresses, updating proxy management logic, etc., begins.
Developers rarely manage to create an extremely reliable proxy infrastructure from the start. Typically, it's an iterative process where proxy issues occur and adequate solutions are built to restore scraping functionality.
Over time, the complexity and reliability of the proxy infrastructure increase, but not without significant development resources and countless late-night attempts to fix the latest proxy issue.
Proxy Servers Are Not a Priority
The fact is, for most developers and companies, proxy management is at the very bottom of the priority list. They are interested in extracting target data as efficiently and quickly as possible and focusing on their core interests—analysis and decision-making based on that data, integrating that data into their products and services, and growing their business.
In virtually any situation, web scrapers gain little from building their own proxy management infrastructure from scratch, except maybe experience in proxy management logic development or a small saving on direct proxy costs (often the indirect design costs far outweigh the direct savings).
That's why we always recommend our users to at least outsource some elements of proxy management infrastructure. Whether it's getting proxies from a provider that also offers proxy rotation or other configurations, or our recommended approach—using a proxy management API that completely eliminates proxy management headaches.
Using a Ready-Made Proxy Management Solution
When it comes to web scraping, especially at scale, we recommend using a proven, full-featured ready-made proxy management solution.
It will save your team countless weeks of development time, allow you to start extracting the needed data immediately, and significantly improve scraping reliability.
Developing scrapers, post-processing, and data analysis already take enough time, so there's no need to reinvent the wheel by building and maintaining your own in-house proxy management infrastructure.
By using a ready-made proxy management solution, you get access to a highly reliable and configurable proxy infrastructure from day one. No need to spend weeks building a proxy management system and fixing the inevitable issues that arise when extracting data.
How to Choose the Best Proxy Solution for Your Project
Choosing an approach to building and managing a proxy pool can be a headache. In this section, we'll go over some questions you need to ask yourself when choosing the best proxy solution for your needs:
What is your budget?
If you have a very limited or almost zero budget, then managing your own proxy pool will be the cheapest option. However, if you have even a small budget of $20 per month, you should seriously consider outsourcing proxy management to a specialized solution that handles everything.
What is your #1 priority?
If your top priority is learning about proxies and everything related to web scraping, then buying your own proxy pool and managing it yourself is probably the best option. However, if your priority is obtaining the web data you need and achieving maximum web scraping performance—which is the case for most companies—then it's almost always better to outsource proxy management. Or at least use a proxy rotator.
What is your level of technical skill and available resources?
To manage your own proxy pool for a reasonably sized scraping project, you need at least basic software development knowledge and the bandwidth to build and maintain proxy management logic in your crawler. If you lack such knowledge or cannot allocate engineering resources for it, you should either use a proxy rotator and build your own proxy management infrastructure, or use a ready-made proxy management solution.
The answers to these questions will help you quickly decide which proxy management approach best suits your needs.