Anonymous Scraping with Visual Web Ripper

It’s very common to use proxy servers for web data extraction. If you want to stay undetected when you scrape a website, you have to change your IP address periodically. Otherwise it is very easy to detect unusual activity by observing a large number of requests from a single IP address. Visual Web Ripper has a built-in support of proxy servers called Private Proxy Switch.

How to get it?

To access this functionality you need to sign up entering your serial key (you can enter your trial key as well) or voucher (if you have one).

You can use either Serial Key authentication or IP authentication, but the latter is available on paid plans only.

How much is it?

There are five plans for this service (you can change your plan when necessary from the control panel):

1. Free – 500 Mb/month
2. Light – $9 + 5 Gb/month (subscription)
3. Standard – $39 + 25 Gb/month (subscription)
4. Heavy – $79 + 75 Gb/month (subscription)
5. Year – $49 + 20 Gb/year (one time payment)

How does it work?

Each time your scraper accesses a web page it is given a new IP address from a set of 20 IP addresses. Every 12 hours this set of addresses is replaced with a new one. So if you have all your available addresses blocked, then you need to wait up to 12 hours for a new set of proxy.

To turn the proxy switch on, you need to go to Project > Project Options > Proxies tab and select Proxy Switch:

Alternatives

Of course, this is not the only way of using proxy servers in Visual Web Ripper. You can get private proxy servers with unlimited bandwidth for $1/proxy/month from such services like instantproxies.com and  bind them to Visual Web Ripper.

Or if you need even more proxies, suitable for high loads (600-90000 requests per hour), you can take advantage of Proxify SwitchProxy service; they offer relatively expensive (from 100$/month) proxies, but they are of high quality.