In the world today, the need to stay competitive has continued to remain tasking. As a result, several business ventures and agencies have turned to web scraping to extract actionable data from competing websites in order to attain an edge over their competitors. As a preventive measure against this, a large number of these websites have undertaken stern measures to prevent potential web scraping by creating blockages to suspected IP addresses, thus making it much difficult to extract data.
Mobile proxies provide a solution to this menace, eliminating the possibility of blockages and allowing for opportunities to extract data. Mobile proxies are the type of proxy servers that routes their customer’s web requests through mobile devices connected to cellular networks. Because they make use of mobile IP addresses, websites see requests routed through them as requests coming from mobile devices. This is done by rotating IP addresses and redirecting traffic through various mobile devices connected to 3G/4G devices. An integral part of mobile proxies for web scraping is access to all IPs in the wireless carrier’s pool, which includes thousands of addresses that will be used dynamically. This enhances the difficulty in detecting masked IP addresses, resulting in increased security, privacy, and anonymity.
Knowing which mobile proxy to use may pose a difficulty. However, one’s choice may be shaped by the factors of price, speed, and reliability. When choosing the best mobile proxies consider the following providers: ScraperAPI, 4GProxiesDirect, AirProxy, Itespace, Proxylte & 3G Proxy. If it’s hard to tell which proxy provider can get you the best service, read this guide to web scraping proxies.
Mobile proxies work as a middle man between the web scraping tool and the website it is scrapping. This way, the HTTP request to any website would pass through the proxy first and the mobile proxy will be the one to pass on the request to the target website by using its credentials. The target website won’t have any idea that the request is coming from a person or a proxy server as they will see it as a normal HTTP request. Mobile proxies help to mask scraper’s IP address, avoid IP blocking, bypass limits set by target websites & provide better security.
Having simplified the basic principle of the performance of mobile proxies, it is best to take cognizance of areas such as a rotating mobile proxy. The terms “rotating proxies” & “mobile rotating proxies” are sometimes wrongly linked. This term linkage remains incorrect because while the mobile proxy (IP) rotates, the user or attached account gets a fresh IP address from the same location, same ISP and even sometimes from the same cell tower. Questions have arisen as to whether a mobile proxy could be blacklisted. Factually, every single network has its own closed database of blacklisted IP addresses which would never get into the public, otherwise, it would be easy to detect for every spammer what pool Ip is clean and which is not. In clear terms, a mobile proxy cannot be blacklisted. In conclusion, a mobile proxy is just a must-have in any correct working setup.
