There are a few reasons why proxies are essential for web scraping:
- If you only use one IP for scraping, it will be quickly blocked by the target website
- Some sites will also block your account
- Rate limiting on the target website will make the scraping process very slow without proxies
- In some countries, web scraping is illegal, and using your own IP may get you in legal troubles
Proxies give you access to multiple IPs and help to overcome these issues.
There are a lot of websites offering free proxy lists, but the quality of their proxies varies a lot. With such easy access to them, most of these proxies are already used by many other scrapers who happen to be online. When too many people use the same proxy, it can get blocked just as fast as your normal IP address with no proxy (or it may be already blocked). So to find a good source of free proxies, you need to balance between their popularity and quality.
We've narrowed it down to the best and most reliable free proxy lists for you.
WebScraping.AI
Link: https://webscraping.ai
Unlike other sites here, WebScraping.AI provides the same high-quality proxies on its free plan as on paid plans. Proxies are automatically monitored and rotated to not be over-used on the same target sites. The only catch is the limited number of requests: you get 2000 API calls per month for free, but this may be enough for small scraping projects.
sslproxies.org, free-proxy-list.net, us-proxy.org, socks-proxy.net
Links: https://sslproxies.org, https://free-proxy-list.net, https://us-proxy.org, https://socks-proxy.net
These websites look almost the same, so they most likely belong to the same company. This proxy list updates every 10 minutes. SOCKS and SSL proxies are available. Only RAW text export, US and UK country filters.
proxy-list.download
Link: https://proxy-list.download
HTTP, SOCKS and SSL proxies. TXT, CSV, JSON, PDF exports. Country, ping, ports filters.
proxyscrape.com
Link: https://proxyscrape.com
HTTP, SOCKS proxies. Filter by countries and anonymity. TXT exports, country and ping filters.
Proxies scraping
You can use https://github.com/iw4p/proxy-scraper to scrape proxies from some of these lists to avoid copy-pasting or exporting/importing them manually.
Conclusion
Using free proxies is a viable solution for small-scale hobby projects. But as your project gets bigger, finding proxies and maintaining the list will take too much time.
We've got you covered. Just sign up for WebScraping.AI: forget about managing proxies and focus on your project.