Best Proxies for Web Scraping

Residential proxies are the best choice for web scraping because they use real IP addresses assigned by ISPs to homeowners. This makes your requests indistinguishable from regular user traffic, dramatically reducing detection and block rates compared to datacenter proxies.

Rotating proxies assign a new IP address to each request or at set intervals. This prevents websites from detecting patterns in your traffic and applying rate limits or bans. Shifter rotates through 205M+ residential IPs, so each request appears to come from a different real user.

Route requests through residential proxies that rotate real IP addresses, respect each site's rate limits, and vary your timing and headers so traffic looks human. Shifter's residential proxies add automatic rotation, geo-targeting, and session control on real residential IPs, so your traffic blends in with organic visitors.

In most jurisdictions, using residential proxies to collect publicly available data is legal when you follow each site's terms of service and robots.txt and respect data-protection laws. You remain responsible for how the data is used, so review the rules for your use case and region.

Absolutely. Shifter uses standard HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5 proxy protocols, so it integrates with any scraping tool or framework. This includes Scrapy, Selenium, Puppeteer, Playwright, Beautiful Soup, and custom scripts in Python, Node.js, Go, or any language.

Rotating proxies give each request a new IP, or change it on a timer, ideal for high-volume scraping where every request should look like a different user. Sticky proxies keep the same IP for a session, configurable by sid or ttl, which suits multi-step flows like logging in, paginating, or checking out. Shifter supports both on one endpoint, so you can switch per request.

Residential proxies are billed per GB. Estimate your average page size times the number of requests, then add a margin for retries. Blocking images, scripts, and fonts you don't need cuts usage a lot. Plans include a monthly bandwidth amount, and you can move up as you grow.

Choose Full Geo when you need country, state, city, or ASN targeting. Country Geo fits scraping that only needs the right country. Non-Geo suits high-volume jobs where location does not matter, at the lowest price per GB.

Residential proxies rotate per request, per session, or on a timer, which suits large-scale collection. ISP proxies stay in the city and on the ISP (ASN) you choose for the whole billing period, which suits logged-in or account-based scraping.

Use residential proxies if you already run your own scrapers and want full control. Use Shifter's Web Scraping API if you would rather not manage proxies, rotation and blocks: it handles JavaScript rendering, CAPTCHA solving and retries, and returns raw HTML or parsed JSON.