Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Retry and Backoff: How Scrapers Turn Small Failures Into Bans
Most scraper bans are self-inflicted. A naive retry loop answers one throttled response with a burst of traffic, right when a site asked for less.
Chris Collins · August 23, 2026 When Do You Actually Need a Headless Browser to Scrape?
A headless browser is the most expensive way to fetch a page. Most sites do not need one. Here is how to decide between plain HTTP and a full browser.
Chris Collins · August 20, 2026 How to Scrape Heavily Protected Sites: The Escalation Ladder from Plain Requests to Full Stealth
Don't run every scrape at max stealth. Match effort to the target: start with a plain client and clean IP, and climb only when a site forces you to.
Chris Collins · August 12, 2026 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 · August 11, 2026 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 · August 10, 2026 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 · August 6, 2026 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 · August 4, 2026 How to Tell When a Site Is Serving You Fake or Blocked Content
The dangerous scraping failure is not the 403 you can see, it is the 200 OK full of junk. How to detect soft blocks, honeypots, and poisoned data.
Chris Collins · July 31, 2026 Web Scraping Best Practices: How to Collect Data Without Harming the Sites You Scrape
Responsible web scraping: honor robots.txt, rate-limit, back off on 429s, cache, and scrape off-peak. Being a good citizen also gets you blocked far less.
Chris Collins · July 27, 2026