What is IP Rotation? Benefits for Scraping
Today, in the digital age, the primary source of information is the Internet. You can find any information related to daily life, health issues, or prices of new gaming computers. Even some well-known universities upload their courses to adapt to how things work in the digital era. We can reach any information with one tap on our mobile phones. So far, everything seems so reasonable. However, there is some bad news. You can not be on the loose on the Internet as websites and governments set some restrictions. Governments may ban online content they don’t like, and this is a raging issue. According to Freedom House’s report, the freedom on the Internet rate was 30 percent in 47 countries in 2012, and the number decreased to 22 percent at the end of 2018. However, there are some alternative methods to free the Internet, such as Proxy services and IP rotations. IP rotation enables you to surf the web more freely. The web pages would recognize the request you send with your local IP, and you may not get the HTML information in return due to the local restrictions and IP bans.
Nevertheless, with the help of IP rotation, you can rotate your IP to a whole another location so that the request will be sent to your new IP address, which contains a different location address than yours. So the chances to be banned reduced nearly to zero. Let’s get into the details.
What Does IP Rotation Mean?
First, what is an IP address? Each IP address is a unique number that identifies devices connected to the web, and it reveals information including the city, the area code of ISP, your ISP’s name, and ZIP code etc. It is like the physical addresses of ours. IP rotation is the application of assigning different IP addresses to the online device at given periods. IP rotation could also change IP addresses at random intervals.
When you are connected to the Internet with your ISP, internet service provider, your device is instantly assigned to a random IP address from the pool of IPs. If the current IP is banned or somehow you lose the connection to the Internet, the system automatically tries to reconnect. And during that time, the Internet service provider will pull the other available IP address and assign it to your online digital device. ISPs rotate IPs as the number of users exceeds IP addresses on their hands. As the IP address of a random user disconnects from the web, the internet service provider determines the address as available and match the waiting user’s online device with the idle IP address from their pool of IP addresses. So the resources of IP addresses are used most efficiently.
What Is Web Scraping And What Is It Used For?
Web scraping, also known as web harvesting, or web data extraction, is a widespread technique often used by data analysts for various reasons related to their projects. The web scraping tools are used fort o extract large amounts of data automatically from web pages, and it stores these large datasets in its database system. Mostly, web scraping tools save those datasets in a spreadsheet format.
The only way to monitor data is using a browser application, and web pages generally set obstacles to prevent someone from copying, saving, or downloading their data. If you need specific data from a target website, you may do it manually. Copying, pasting and keeping all those data is a very tedious thing to do, and it would probably take quite a long time, which could be more useful somewhere else. Web scraping tools saves all the time wasted by doing the process manually, by conducting all actions automatically. Based on your preferences and requirements, a web scraping tool will access, scan, and extract information automatically from various websites simultaneously.
What Is Web Scraping Used For?
Simply, web scraping tools are used for obtaining the data. Accessing tons of data, extracting these data to eventually categorize and eliminate the unrelated ones, and with the meaningful ones, analyzing in order to have a deep insight could make a vast difference for a business to succeed in their own sector. In today’s modern world and business environment, having a deep understanding related to your business is one of the most efficient competitive advantages.
The following are some of the use cases of web scraping tools:
Web scraping methods are mainly used for eCommerce purposes. Price monitoring via web scraping tools is essential for the most competitive firms these days.
Web scraping tools are used for building phone and e-mail sheets to reach out to potential and targeted customers.
Moreover, web scraping methods are also used to collect vast data for the most testing phase of machine learning projects.
See More Details About Data Crawler Software
Why Is IP Rotating Is Important For Real-Time Data And Web Scraping?
Most web scraping tool users are experiencing the problem of getting blocked. A ban from some specific content-related web pages would reduce the potential of the web scraping tool as it will not be able to access these particular content anymore. Web pages use a bot-prevention system. If the system receives so many requests from the same IP address, it will automatically categorize that IP address as a bot and restrict its access to the website. But, there are some methods to avoid the risk of getting banned. These are rotating the IP addresses, using public or private proxies, or spoofing and rotating user agents.
To dodge the bot detectors of web pages, using three of these techniques might be beneficial. And, therefore, the ban risk will be reduced dramatically. Using the IP rotation method helps to web scraping tool to send request multiple requests. As of now, the bot protection system will see that these requests are not from a single location, which, basically, would be a bot, but from different locations across the world.
So as to use web scraping tools at their total capacity, there shall be no restrictions stopping web scraping tools from reaching websites and extracting the necessary data. With no measurements for IP address ban risk, web scraping tools will always have a limited capacity. And, it may not reach price information of some web service as there might be geo-restrictions due to the government legislations or your IP address might have just been banned.
The Advantages Of IP Rotating Proxies For Web Scraping
Proxies with the IP rotation feature is an essential service for various businesses. Services that provide security for their users while surfing the Internet use rotating IP proxies to secure their own information. Cybersecurity firms shall use such a service because they need to check millions of web pages to operate their businesses. IP rotating proxies boosts the capabilities of web scraping and web crawling.
These IP rotating proxies are the middle-man between your device and the web as they keep providing you with different IP addresses for a determined period of time. So, it hides your IP address which is your digital identity, which enables you to stick around the web with anonymity and privacy.
And the followings are the benefits of rotating IP changer Proxy services:
The Increased Level Of Reliability
Proxies that are frequently rotating the IP address of your device provide you with a higher degree of reliability than surfing on the Internet without an IP rotation Proxy. The requests that are being sent through your digital device are assigned to a unique IP address. And, to avoid geo-restrictions or the chance of getting banned, users often do change their own IP addresses. Doing all these processes frequently and manually during a project takes quite a time and distracts users from the other aspects of the project. And IP rotating Proxy service assigns each request to a different available IP address from their IP pool. So, the whole process is done by the IP rotating service, and you can focus on more crucial factors related to your project.
Eliminates The Risk Of Limit Ban
Websites do use anti-bot and security measurements, and they keep improving these applications. The standard versions of proxies could hide your device’s IP address and provide anonymity. However, if there is no IP rotation feature, the Websites’ security system will add suspicious IP addresses to the blacklist after some point. If bot-like activity continues, the anti-bot system will ban your IP address eventually.
Moreover, websites often use rate-limiting methods to control traffic circulation of their websites. They monitor incoming and outgoing traffic to check the stability of the server of the web page. This system is designated to limit the number of requests occurring from each IP address. Therefore, the would-be no responses of information for these IP addresses. For the daily users of the Internet, this is not a big deal. However, if you are using web scraping tools to extract data, you can survive the limiting control of these websites by using an IP rotating Proxy.
Full Stack Developer
Hey, there! As a true data-geek working in the software department, getting real-time data for the companies I work for is really important: It created valuable insight. Using IP rotation, I recreate the competitive power for the brands and companies and get super results. I’m here to share my experiences!