If you treat your infrastructure as a static, “set and forget” tool, proxy failures will become an inevitable problem for you to manage. There is a constant cat-and-mouse type game between scrapers and target websites, a bit like how Tom and Jerry always play the same chases across every episode. When the target website updates its anti-bot measures, your proxy configuration can become immediately obsolete, and you have to start all over again.
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Helpfully, you can view this as a system audit. Instead of only reacting to breakages with troubleshooting steps, you can proactively prevent the break and add resilience into your proxy usage. This article will walk you through the whys and hows.
Why most proxy setups eventually break
Anti-bot protection continues evolving; websites are getting smarter at defending themselves and identifying bot-like activity. Getting blocked isn’t personal. But the solution is manageable.
Every now and then, websites update their web application firewall (WAF) and look for new signatures and digital fingerprints. If your script doesn’t get updated from time to time, your script will be toast. This is because IPs are constantly being flagged by the WAF, and each update will roll in more addresses to the block list. Additionally, IP management can be a minefield – a clean IP address today can be dirty tomorrow if the proxy provider isn’t also actively monitoring and rotating their pool.
An extra layer of defence for website servers is, when undergoing increased volumes of traffic, but without the increase in sales, to start enforcing stricter digital handshakes (transport layer security, or TLS) as an encrypted and secure connection between any script and the website. If your script’s handshake doesn’t mimic a standard web browser, the website detects you’re a bot and shuts you down.
A final pitfall can be if your script isn’t using the most modern language, either. Websites may look for an HTTP/2 script nowadays, and if your bot is an older tool, it may still be using HTTP/1.1 as its language. In this case, the server will recognize your script as a machine and block the connection.
The flaw in “good enough” proxy solutions
There is a difference between good and good enough; assessing cost versus performance will almost always be a kind of trap. Many users fall for the idea of a cheap proxy from a datacenter that sells them in bulk. However, the moment you hit a high-security target, like Amazon, Ticketmaster, or even a major brand like Nike, your proxy will instantly fail.
Good enough, therefore, is a liability. Using the best proxy server means you are paying for the integrity of their IP addresses; clean ones that haven’t been poisoned by previous abusive users. Compare this with the fact that cheap providers oversell their pool. This means that instead of sharing an IP with other people, you are also sharing it with bad actors who have already been banned by the target website.
The only way to have full confidence that your projects requiring use of a proxy server will have the maximum uptime possible is to invest in a high-quality proxy provider. Most reputable providers will limit the number of users assigned to each IP address in the pool, and ensure that they continue to refresh the available addresses to keep every single server node clean for use.
Matching the right proxy to the target website
The second most important factor in avoiding a failure with your proxy is to ensure that you are strategically selecting the right type of proxy for your project. If we classify websites as having three different levels of complexity – low, medium and high – then we can outline what type of proxy is most appropriate for each classification.
A low security website is a public site with no major bot detection deployed to weed out visitors or bot activity, meaning that these can be handled by a simple datacenter proxy. Connections from datacenter IPs tend to be electrifyingly fast but are the most frequently blocked. If a website doesn’t feel the need for a high security firewall, you’ll be fine to access it through one of these server nodes.
Medium security websites are those that employ a defence of standard rate limiting, meaning that you’ll find yourself blocked for trying to force too many accesses in a short period of time. To access these websites while trying to deploy a web scraping project, you’ll need to use a residential proxy so that you appear to be an average domestic internet user instead of a bot.
High-profile websites that know they’re very likely to be a target for bots and a large volume of simultaneous access requests. These require complex fingerprinting to access them, sometimes ask for CAPTCHA tests to be undertaken by users, and even deploy behavioral analysis of the requests before allowing them through to the website. This type of high-security, or anti-bot, website requires an internet service provider (ISP) or mobile proxy node.
In short, if you’re using a $50 datacenter proxy on a high-security target, you will fail 99.9% of the time. The information above will help you understand why that failure happens and how best to match your proxy to the target website.
How to implement a resilient proxy strategy
For you to have confidence that your proxy usage is resilient against all types of defences, you need to develop an architecture that gives you a workflow that you can rely on. This checklist will cover three important factors: error handling, health checks and diversification.
Starting with how to handle errors, you mustn’t just immediately retry a failed request. You should log it in a spreadsheet, including full identification of the specific error code (e.g., 403, 429, etc.), and then switch the proxy node or type before processing a new request.
It is also sensible to test the ping of every single proxy before you actually send your next, real data request. There’s nothing worse than thinking you’ve logged the error, changed the proxy node, and you get a repeat error. Sometimes this can simply be that the proxy node is dead and needs pruning from your active list. The simplest way to check is to go to whatsmyip and check that it shows the correct location for your proxy and was able to complete the connection to the website.
A final, important step for success is never to rely on a single proxy source. When you opt to use the best proxy server, you should have a provider that offers multiple different pathways so that you can match your proxy to the project without encountering any problems on each occasion. A provider that can offer datacenter, residential, and mobile or ISP nodes will allow you to switch proxy levels in seconds, giving you the maximum uptime for your project.
Where this leaves your proxy project
At the end of the day, failure is inevitable, but significant downtime is optional. You can choose to use a lower-cost and lower-quality connection, and this will increase the amount of time your project spends failing. A higher-quality proxy provider will give you the quickest route back to your script running.
Don’t view a reliable proxy server as an expense, but instead as an insurance policy. You can align your proxy infrastructure with the difficulty of the target website and discover that the number of failures you encounter will drop significantly. So stop fighting your tools and start upgrading them with the best proxy server provider that takes IP integrity seriously.
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