Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Automating Daily Keyword Position Monitoring with a SERP API
Scheduling the fetch is the easy part. Here is the pipeline that turns daily SERP calls into a rank series you can trust, alert on, and explain to a client.
Chris Collins · September 1, 2026 Configuring Residential Proxies in Selenium and Playwright
The gateway is identical for both, but proxy authentication is not. Here is the same setup in each framework and the differences that shape your architecture.
Chris Collins · August 31, 2026 What to Do When Your Residential Proxy IPs Get Banned
On a rotating pool you do not recover a banned address, you replace it. The real work is finding what got it banned before the replacement goes the same way.
Chris Collins · August 29, 2026 Residential Proxy Retry Logic: Handling Failed and Rate-Limited Requests
A retry is a decision, not a loop. Here is the classification table, the code, and the guardrails that stop retries turning a bad minute into a bad day.
Chris Collins · August 28, 2026 Matching Residential Proxy Geo, Timezone and Locale for Clean Sessions
A German exit reporting a New York timezone is a contradiction no real visitor produces. Derive every locale signal from the exit country and they cannot drift.
Chris Collins · August 27, 2026 How to Monitor Residential Proxy Health at Scale
At scale the useful question is not whether the proxy works, but which slice of it stopped working. Here is how to instrument routes, regions and sessions.
Chris Collins · August 27, 2026 Building a Residential Proxy Manager: Rotation, Health Checks and Retries
The logic that decides which exit to use, when to retire it, and how to recover belongs in one component. Here is how to design it and what state it needs.
Chris Collins · August 26, 2026 Setting the Right Headers and User-Agent with Residential Proxies
A clean residential IP gets you to the door. Headers decide whether you look like a browser once through it, and consistency matters more than any single value.
Chris Collins · August 26, 2026