Daniel - December 1, 2020
Best Beautiful Soup Proxies
Do you plan to make use of Beautiful Soup? One of the things you’ll need is a proxy. In this article, I’ll be explaining the best beautiful soup proxies and also why you need them.
Best Beautiful Soup Proxies
For Beautiful Soup and web scraping in general, you need the most anonymous type of proxies and that implies residential proxies. Thus, residential proxies are the best Beautiful Soup proxies.
Residential proxies are very anonymous because the IP addresses they feature are gotten from Internet Service Providers (ISPs). As a result, it is as if you’re browsing without a proxy because every regular internet user uses an IP address issued by their ISP which is also what you’re using.
The website you’re scraping will trace your IP address to an ISP and it’ll be difficult for you to get blocked. This contrasts with datacenter proxies whose IP addresses are traced to datacenters.
The best residential proxies out there are offered by ProxyRack. Check out their subscription plans:
Unmetered Residential Proxies: Starting at $80 per month
Premium GEO Residential Proxies: Starting at $14.95
Private Residential Proxies: Starting at $99.95
Residential proxies are the best but you can also make use of datacenter proxies. However, it must be a rotary one so with every IP address switch, it’ll be difficult for your proxy to be detected.
ProxyRack offers datacenter proxies as well. Check out their subscription plans:
USA Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Mixed Rotating Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $120
Shared Datacenter Proxies: Starting at $49
Find the perfect Proxy Product.
Beautiful Soup Overview
Beautiful Soup is a Python library that you can use to extract data from HTML, XML, and other markup language files. Whenever data extraction from web files is mentioned, you know it is web scraping. Beautiful soup utilizes simple methods of searching, navigating, and modification. As a result, it is one of the faster Python libraries for web scraping.
Web pages in HTML, XML, and other markup languages usually do not provide any direct means of downloading data. For example, you load a web page with data you need such as addresses, dates, names, etc. There’s no way to download such data unless you start copying and pasting. If the data is plentiful, you’ll spend so much time copying and pasting; that’s the advantage of using a web scraper tool like Beautiful Soup.
When you use Beautiful Soup, the data is not just extracted but also cleaned. This implies that the information you need such as address, date, names, etc. are separated from the web language elements. i.e the markup, tags, titles, etc.
You’ll need an additional package for parsing the content but that is easy to implement too. As a result, beautiful Soup is ideal for beginners as it’s very easy to use but professionals can also leverage it.
Why You Need A Proxy For Beautiful Soup?
Web scraping is not a task you want to perform without a proxy. Doing that means you are directly exposing your IP address to the website you are scraping and since most websites and platforms do not allow web scraping, your IP address has about a 95% chance of being blocked.
With a proxy, it is the opposite i.e your IP address is not exposed. This is because a proxy is a server that comes in between your computer and the internet. It acts as a gateway such that requests you sent are first received by the proxy and then forwarded to the internet and the same applies to downloading the web content.
As you scrape with a proxy, the website reads only the IP address of the proxy. You might wonder what the difference is and if the IP address still won’t be blocked. Well, proxies are optimized to not be easily detected; they are very secure and very fast. You may be done with your scraping task before the website’s server realizes what’s going on.
Besides, proxies are not limited to one IP address, or two, or five, or ten; they feature millions of IP addresses. If any gets blocked, simply switch to another and if it’s a rotary proxy, your IP address switches automatically so none can be blocked.
Check out our full range of Residential Proxies
Check out our full Range of Datacenter Proxies
Conclusion
Beautiful Soup is one of the easiest web scraping tools out there and to scrape successfully with it, you need a proxy. If you want to use the best Beautiful Soup proxies, go for residential proxies.
