In short
For most web scraping, rotating residential proxies offer the best balance of success rate and cost. Datacenter proxies suit high-volume, low-protection targets, while mobile proxies handle the hardest sites and account work. The best provider gives you pay-as-you-go pricing and country/city targeting from one pool.
What makes a proxy good for scraping
- A large, clean IP pool so requests are spread thin and IPs are not already burned.
- Both rotating and sticky sessions for stateless and stateful jobs.
- Country and city targeting to collect localized data accurately.
- HTTP and SOCKS5 support to fit any scraping stack.
- Pay-as-you-go billing so you only pay for what you crawl.
How to scrape without getting blocked
Bans come from patterns, not just IPs. Combine quality proxies with realistic browser headers, randomized timing, and correct rotation. Handle CAPTCHAs and retries gracefully, and back off when a site signals it is overloaded.
- Rotate residential IPs per request for public pages.
- Use sticky sessions for anything behind a login.
- Send complete, consistent headers and a real user-agent.
- Throttle and randomize — predictable traffic is the #1 tell.
Scaling to millions of requests
At scale, success rate matters more than raw speed: a 99% success rate with residential proxies beats a 70% rate with cheap IPs once you count retries. Architect around proxy pooling, idempotent retries, and per-domain concurrency limits, and monitor block rates per target so you can switch proxy type when a site tightens its defenses.
Frequently asked questions
What are the best proxies for web scraping?
Rotating residential proxies are best for most scraping because they have the lowest block rate at reasonable cost. Datacenter proxies are best for high-volume, low-protection targets, and mobile proxies for the hardest sites.
How do I scrape a website without getting blocked?
Use rotating residential proxies, send realistic and consistent headers, randomize request timing, choose the correct rotation mode, and handle retries and CAPTCHAs gracefully.
How many proxies do I need for scraping?
With a rotating residential pool you do not manage individual proxies — the provider spreads requests across millions of IPs automatically. You pay per GB of traffic, not per IP.
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