Blog

Guides, Tutorials & Insights

Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.

Scraping
Scraping 7 min read

How to Scrape Sites That Require Login: Sessions, Cookies, and Sticky Proxies at Scale

Scraping behind a login is about identity, not rotation. Persist session cookies, pin each account to one clean sticky IP, and stay logged in without a ban.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · August 11, 2026
Scraping
Scraping 7 min read

Why Your Scraper Gets Blocked Before It Loads the Page: TLS and HTTP/2 Fingerprinting

Clean residential IP, real User-Agent, still blocked instantly? Anti-bot fingerprints your HTTP client at the TLS and HTTP/2 layer, before your request is read.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · August 10, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 6 min read

What Is an Antidetect Browser and How Residential Proxies Fit In

An antidetect browser gives each profile its own device fingerprint. But that is only half of identity, the IP is the other half, and the two must match.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · August 9, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 7 min read

How to Rotate Residential Proxies in Scrapy with Custom Middleware

Scrapy sets the proxy via meta, but the Proxy-Authorization caching gotcha breaks rotation. A custom middleware that rotates identity and retries on blocks.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · August 8, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 8 min read

How to Use Residential Proxies in Selenium (Including Authenticated Proxies)

Selenium sets the proxy host easily but has no built-in way to pass credentials. How to handle authenticated proxies with Selenium Wire, an extension, or CDP.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · August 7, 2026
Scraping
Scraping 7 min read

How to Scrape Pagination and Infinite Scroll Reliably at Scale

Pagination is where scrapers silently lose data: skipped pages, double counts, stopping early. How to get every item once, and know when you're done.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · August 6, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 8 min read

How to Use Residential Proxies in Puppeteer (Including page.authenticate)

Proxies in Puppeteer: the proxy goes in launch args, credentials in page.authenticate, per-page geo rotation through one gateway, and resource blocking.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · August 5, 2026
Scraping
Scraping 7 min read

Monitoring a Scraping Pipeline: The Metrics That Tell You It's Breaking Before Your Data Does

A scraper fails silently: the cron fires, the logs say 200, the data goes wrong. The metrics and alerts that catch it in the pipeline, not the boardroom.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · August 4, 2026