Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
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 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 · August 9, 2026 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 · August 8, 2026 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 · August 7, 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 Shifter vs Decodo: We Counted Every Live IP in 5 Countries
Shifter costs from $0.75/GB against Decodo's $2.75. We sent 560,000 requests through each in 5 countries and counted every unique exit IP. Full results and method.
Chris Collins · August 5, 2026 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 · August 5, 2026