The Best Datacenter Proxies for Web Scraping Compared

Guide To Finding The Best Datacenter Proxies For Web Scraping?

This proxy comparison tool is designed to make it easier for you to compare and find the best datacenter proxy plans for your particular use case.

It allows you to compare the price, features, reviews of each datacenter proxy plan in one place before making your decision, along with other criteria like:

• Integration: What integration options do each proxy provider provide.
• Billing: Does the proxy provider only offer monthly subscriptions or do they offer pay-as-you-go plans.
• Advanced Functionality: Does the proxy provider offer more advanced functionality like in-built Javascript rendering, country geotargeting, sticky sessions, etc.

All of these can be important factors when making a decision about which proxy provider you would like to integrate with.

So to help you make the best decision, we will go through the most important factors you need to consider when choosing a datacenter proxy provider.

First, we're going to make sure we will quickly explain what are datacenter proxies?

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What Are Datacenter Proxies?

Datacenter proxies are proxies that use the IP addresses owned and hosted by datacenters. They are not affiliated with an Internet Service Provider (ISP), so don't appear like residential IP addresses. However, they still hide your IP address when you use them to scrape websites, and can be used to scrape difficult websites at scale.

Datacenter proxy providers either buy blocks of IP addresses and host them in datacenters or buy access to existing datacenter IP networks and provide them to their users.

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When To Use Datacenter Proxies?

Datacenter proxies are the most common type of proxy used in web scraping, VPNs, and botting, as they have a lot of benefits over residential and mobile proxies.

• Large Scale Scraping: If you are scraping at very large scales, then datacener proxies should be your first option. They have the best combination of low costs and high bandwidth capabilities that make them the most suitable proxy option when scraping at scale.

• Economical Scraping: If you want to keep your scraping costs down, then the most cost effective option as they are over 10X less expensive than residential and mobile proxies.

• Fast Scraping: If speed is a big concern for you, then datacenter proxies are a great option. Typically, they have much lower latencies than residential & mobile proxies as they are hosted on powerful servers in datacenters.

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How To Integrate Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies can typically be bought in two formats:

1. Rotating proxies where you are given a single endpoint to send your requests.
2. List of datacenter IP addresses that you send your requests to.

How you integrate with each is slightly different, but both are pretty simple.

Single Endpoint Rotating Proxy

A single rotating proxy endpoint will look something like BrightData's:

http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225

Integrating this proxy endpoint into your web scrapers is very easy, as it normally is just a parameter you add to the request. No need to worry about rotating proxies or managing bans, etc.

Here is a simple example using Python:

import requests

proxies = {
   'http': 'http://zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225',
   'https': 'http://zproxy.lum-superproxy.io:22225',
}

url = 'http://example.com/'

response = requests.get(url, proxies=proxies, auth=('USERNAME', 'PASSWORD'))

Proxy List Integration

When you purchase a datacenter proxy list from a proxy provider, you will recieve a set of IP addresses that will look something like this:

'http://Username:Password@IP1:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP2:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP3:20000',
'http://Username:Password@IP4:20000',

To integrate them into our scrapers we need to configure our code to pick a new proxy from this list everytime we make a request.

In Python we could do it using code like this:

import requests
from itertools import cycle

list_proxy = ['http://Username:Password@IP1:20000',
              'http://Username:Password@IP2:20000',
              'http://Username:Password@IP3:20000',
               'http://Username:Password@IP4:20000',
              ]

proxy_cycle = cycle(list_proxy)
# Prime the pump
proxy = next(proxy_cycle)

for i in range(1, 10):
    proxy = next(proxy_cycle)
    print(proxy)
    proxies = {
      "http": proxy,
      "https":proxy
    }
    r = requests.get(url='https://example.com/', proxies=proxies)
    print(r.text)

This is a simplistic example, as when scraping at scale we would also need to build a mechanism to monitor the performance of each individual IP address and remove it from the proxy rotation if it got banned or blocked.

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Paying For Datacenter Proxies

As there are two main ways we can buy datacenter proxies, there are also two ways in which we can purcahse them.

1. Pay Per GB of Bandwidth Consumed: When the proxy provider manages the proxy rotation themselves and gives you access via a single endpoint, then typically you will pay per GB of bandwidth you consume. With most datacenter proxy providers you will subscribe to a monthly plan that gives you a set amount of bandwidth you can use in a month and you can keep using their datacenter proxy pool until you have consumed your entire quota.

2. Pay Per IP Address: When you are purchasing a list of datacenter proxies then you typically pay per IP address in the list. Here you can send as many requests as you would like through your list of proxies and not have to worry about bandwidth.

Paying per IP address generally works out cheaper than paying per GB, however, more and more proxy providers are starting to only offer then pay per GB option as their profit margins are higher and it is easier for them to manage their proxy pools.

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Alternatives to Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies are the cheapest proxy option, however, they are also the most unreliable and most likely to get blocked by websites.

In cases, when your datacenter proxies stop working then here are your other options:

Smart Proxies

Often the easier and better solution than datacenter proxies is to use a smart proxy solution that manages the entire proxy infrastructure for you. You send them the pages you would like to scrape and they return the HTML response of that page.

These smart proxy solutions handle all the proxy rotation & selection, header optimization, ban page & CAPTCHA detection, and retries for you on their end.

As a extra bonus, you only pay for successful requests. So it is a much more predictable way of scaling your web scraping.

Residential & Mobile Proxies

The most expensive alternative to using datacenter proxies is to use residential or mobile proxies.

Residential or mobile proxies are much more reliable than datacenter proxies as your requests are routed through real user devices (PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones) making it much harder for websites to determine that you are in fact a scraper.

The downside to using residential or mobile proxies is that they are 10-30 times more expensive than datacenter proxies, so should be only used as a last resort.