Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Residential Proxy Free Trials: What to Test Before You Buy
A trial is a limited amount of bandwidth to answer one question: will this work on my targets? Here is what to test, in what order, so you do not waste it.
Matt Brown · August 24, 2026 How to Choose the Right Residential Proxy Plan for Your Project
Picking a proxy plan is three decisions: which product type, how much bandwidth, and which features you actually need. Here is how to get each one right.
Chris Collins · August 24, 2026 Residential Proxies vs Residential VPNs: What's the Difference?
Both route traffic through a home IP, but they are built for different jobs. Here is the difference in plain terms, and which one your project needs.
Matt Brown · August 24, 2026 Real vs Fake Residential Proxies: How to Spot Datacenter IPs Sold as Residential
Some providers sell datacenter IPs as residential. Here is how to tell the difference before you buy, using checks you can run in a few minutes.
James Meadow · August 24, 2026 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 Scraping App Store and Google Play Data Across Countries
An app does not have one ranking, one price, or one set of reviews. It has a different set in every storefront, and you can only read each one from inside it.
James Meadow · August 22, 2026 How Many Proxy IPs Do You Actually Need?
The most common question before buying proxies is also the wrong one. What matters is not how many IPs you have, but how your requests are spread across them.
Matt Brown · August 21, 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 Measure Accurate Keyword Rankings at Scale
There is no single rank for a keyword. It shifts with location, login, and device. Here is how to pin those variables and track true rankings at scale.
James Meadow · August 19, 2026