Что делать, если в процессе выполнения скрапинга ваш IP заблокировали?

Web scraping is the collection of a large amount of data from one or more websites, which involves frequent requests to the server of that site for the desired information. Such traffic by site owners can be considered undesirable because:

• it skews visit statistics with real users;
• increases network usage;
• slows down the site’s response time to user requests up to complete shutdown;
• can lead to theft of commercial and other information.

What to do to avoid IP blocking

First of all, familiarize yourself with the rules of the site you are planning to scrape — if there is a prohibition on scraping, then you are highly likely to receive an IP ban. Specifically, you may be blocked for:

1. Too many requests in a unit of time from one IP or a pool of IPs;
2. Creating high load on the site being accessed;
3. Falling into a bot trap;
4. The parser does not resemble actions of a real user. When your IP is blocked, you will either lose access to the entire site from that IP or to specific pages. If you've been banned, here’s what you can do.

What to do when your IP is banned

1. Contact support to get unblocked. Of course, if you were scraping and it is prohibited by the site's or hosting provider’s rules, the chances of being unblocked are low. Conversely, if you did nothing wrong but your IP is still blocked, there might be other explanations. For example, your Internet provider purchased a pool of IPs, some of which were already blacklisted, and one such IP was assigned to you. After verifying this situation, there are good chances your IP will be unblocked.
2. Restart your router. This works if you're given a new clean IP upon restart due to dynamic IP rotation among active users — this is common with modern providers. However, if you're assigned a "gray" technical IP within your internal network, and only a static public IP is used for Internet access which was banned, then restarting the router will not help.
3. Use VPN services. Depending on your VPN provider, the number of available IP addresses can vary from a few dozen to hundreds of thousands. The larger the pool, generally, the higher the cost. If you regularly perform large-scale tasks, eventually you will exhaust the available IPs, which will be alternately banned.
4. Make each new request during scraping from a new IP. Setting up such automatic rotation can prevent bans altogether. The downside is that this requires a large IP pool and the ability to configure auto-rotation.
5. Use anti-detect browsers. Similar to headless browsers, they possess specialized libraries for proper interaction with sites during scraping. This allows them to emulate real user behavior: page loading, cursor movement, form filling, waiting times, and generally leaving proper digital fingerprints.
6. Use proxy servers. Good proxy providers offer many great tools such as IP rotation, a large pool of available IPs, precise targeting, and easy integration with professional software. There are mobile and residential proxies. Mobile proxies are better.

Conclusion

Getting blacklisted (banned) by IP is not the end of the world. A technically savvy user can bypass restrictions in several ways. If you are a private user with relatively few requests during scraping, all the options listed will suit you. If you are a business user, consider focusing on suitable options such as anti-detect browsers and proxy servers.