Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Enhancing PHP Applications with Web Scraping API Integration
Add web data to a PHP application with a web scraping API: a dependency-free client with retries, structured extraction and parallel requests via curl_multi.
Chris Collins · October 19, 2026 Retry Economics: The Attempt Number Where Retrying Stops Paying for Itself
Each retry is less likely to succeed than the last. How to measure where retrying stops paying off, using your own logs and a few lines of Python.
Elena Petrova · October 19, 2026 Building Scalable Data Pipelines With Node.js and Web Scraping APIs
A Node.js pipeline that fetches thousands of pages through a web scraping API: bounded concurrency, retries, resumable output and a tested design.
Chris Collins · October 16, 2026 How to Use a Web Scraping API: Beginner-Friendly Walkthrough
From your first request to structured JSON: a step-by-step guide to using a web scraping API, with tested Python, error handling and the settings that matter.
Matt Brown · October 15, 2026 When Should You Rotate Proxy IPs? A Decision Framework for Sessions, Cost and Success Rates
Rotate per request, hold a sticky session, or keep a fixed ISP IP? A simple framework for choosing, based on how your requests belong together.
Chris Collins · October 12, 2026 Testing Scrapers: Fixtures, Replay and Regression Suites
Scrapers break when sites change, and tests that hit the live site break with them. How to test a scraper with recorded fixtures, replay and daily canaries.
Chris Collins · October 9, 2026 Your Scraper Is Slow and It Probably Isn't the Proxy
We sped up a scraper running through residential proxies 7.5 times without touching the proxy. How to find where the time really goes, and fix it.
Matt Brown · October 8, 2026 Payload Efficiency: What Share of a Scraped Page Is Boilerplate You Paid For
We measured 278 content pages from the top 1,000 sites. The text you want is about 1% of the HTML and a tiny share of what a browser downloads.
Elena Petrova · October 8, 2026