Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
How to Scale Residential Proxy Scraping Workloads with Kubernetes
Run scraping on Kubernetes: proxy creds as Secrets, per-pod session identity via the Downward API, queue-driven autoscaling, and graceful shutdown.
Chris Collins · July 28, 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 How to Use Residential Proxies in PHP with cURL and Guzzle
Proxies in PHP: cURL's CURLOPT_PROXY and CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, Guzzle's proxy option, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, and per-request geo rotation.
Chris Collins · July 26, 2026 How to Use Residential Proxies in Java with OkHttp and Apache HttpClient
Proxies in Java: OkHttp's proxyAuthenticator gotcha, Apache HttpClient's default-5 per-route pool limit, entity consumption, and per-request geo rotation.
Chris Collins · July 25, 2026 How to Use Residential Proxies in Go with net/http and Colly
Proxies in Go: transport setup, the body-drain and MaxIdleConnsPerHost gotchas that kill connection reuse, per-request geo rotation, and Colly's SetProxyFunc.
Chris Collins · July 24, 2026 Why Your Residential Proxy Requests Are Timing Out
A diagnostic guide to proxy timeouts: connect vs read, over-tight geo filters, timeouts tuned for datacenter, and the checks that find the real cause fast.
Matt Brown · July 23, 2026 Residential Proxy Failover: Building Reliable Multi-Region Data Pipelines
A retry handles a bad request. Failover handles a bad dependency. How to design proxy-backed pipelines that survive block waves, geo degradation, and outages.
Chris Collins · July 22, 2026 Residential Proxies for Flight, Hotel and Travel-Fare Data Collection
Travel fares are point-of-sale priced, session-based, and perishable. Why accurate flight and hotel data collection depends on residential proxies, per market.
James Meadow · July 21, 2026