Effectively managing your proxies is often an underutilized aspect when dealing with proxies.
You would also need to develop your projects for long-term scalability, so you can efficiently extract data even when a long time has passed.
So, to optimize your web scraping projects, here are some points you should thoroughly consider before starting a new project.
Defining Your Traffic Profile
At the beginning of your project, you need to define your traffic profile. A traffic profile includes all the crucial information you require before you start a particular project. It contains:
What websites are you looking to extract data from?
Are there technical issues you may encounter?
How many requests would you like to do?
Do you have a specific timeframe for requests to be sent?
Is there a specific geo-location you want so you can display the correct website content?
If you manage to answer all of these questions, then your traffic profile should then be complete. You can now move on to the next point.
Acquiring Your Proxy Pool
If you’ve managed to define your traffic profile, you now know the specific requirements you need for your proxy pool. You should be able to estimate the following details:
- How many proxies do you need for the project?
- Where should the locations for these proxies be?
- What type of proxies should you use?
After estimating these details, you should be okay to procure your proxies from your desired proxy provider. Do keep in mind that you need your proxies to be clean and healthy if you want them to be effective and have a high success rate.
Managing Your Proxies
After acquiring your proxies, you would now need a great proxy management tool to utilize the proxies efficiently. There are a lot of good proxy managers that you can get for free. When choosing a proxy manager, there are three key components that you should take note of:
Programmability.
The flexibility of a proxy manager should be taken into account as it gives you the ability to customize unique values for certain operations, give support for custom protocols, and enable revisions for existing protocols.
Performance.
The speed of a proxy manager shouldn’t be just fast, it should be extremely fast. The proxy manager should do things quickly, without adding any app experience and slowing the latency.
Protocols.
The usability of a proxy manager should be able to meet every single protocol in the market. From HTTP to SSL/TLS, the proxy manager should fill every performance requirement.
Other important features you should consider for your proxy manager would be if it has a smart proxy rotation, automatically manages headers and maintains sessions, and it has an adaptive geo-location.
If you keep all of these points in mind, you would have higher success rates and thus a lower bandwidth charge. If you want to learn more about web scraping in general, check out our article all about it!
