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

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

• it skews visit statistics with non-human traffic;
• increases network usage;
• slows down the website’s response time to user requests up to complete downtime;
• can lead to theft of commercial and other confidential information.

How to avoid IP blocking

First of all, familiarize yourself with the rules of the website you plan to scrape — if there is a prohibition on scraping, you are highly likely to get an IP ban. Specifically, you might get blocked for:

1. Too many requests per unit of time from one IP or a pool of IPs;
2. Creating high load on the website being accessed;
3. Falling into a bot trap;
4. The parser does not resemble actions of a real user. When you are IP banned, you may either lose access to the entire site from that IP or to specific pages. If you have received a ban, here is what you can do.

What to do when your IP is blocked

1. Contact support to get unblocked. Of course, if you were scraping and it is forbidden by the site or hosting rules, your chances of being unblocked are slim. On the other hand, if you did nothing wrong and your IP is still blocked, there could be other explanations. For example, your Internet provider bought an IP pool, some of which were already blacklisted, and one of these IPs was assigned to you. In such a case, after checking the situation, there is a good chance that your IP will be unblocked.
2. Restart your router. This works if you're given a new static IP through dynamic IP rotation among active users — a common practice among modern providers. However, if you are assigned a "gray" technical IP within your internal network but use a static white IP for Internet access, which is the one that got banned, then restarting the router will not help.
3. Use VPN networks. Depending on your VPN provider, the number of IP addresses available to you can range from a few to hundreds of thousands. The larger the available pool, the higher the cost for such a VPN service. And if you frequently perform large tasks, over time you will exhaust the available IPs, which will periodically get banned.
4. Make each new scraping request from a new IP. By setting up automatic rotation, you can avoid being banned altogether. The downside is that you need a large pool of IP addresses and the ability to set up their auto-rotation.
5. Use anti-detect browsers. Like headless browsers, they have specialized libraries for proper interaction with websites during scraping. This allows them to emulate real user behavior: loading pages, moving the cursor, filling out web forms, waiting for a certain time, and generally leaving accurate digital fingerprints.
6. Use proxy servers. Good proxy providers often offer features such as IP rotation, large pools of accessible 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 relatively tech-savvy user can bypass the ban in several ways. If you are a private user with a relatively small number of requests during scraping, all the options listed above will work for you. If you are a business user, focus on the most suitable options such as anti-detect browsers and proxy servers.