
Web scraping is a method to extract a large amount of data from the web whereby the data is extracted and delivered to a specific location in a structured format. However, many organizations are taking advantages of this service to get the competitor insight and generate more revenue.
When it comes to choosing the web scraping service or its solutions, many organizations fail to understand their demand and needs for their business. However, organizations fail to understand which web scraping service models could fulfil their desire and give the result they want. Is it really benefited to opt with scraping script for once off requirements? Is it really suitable to use custom web crawling services for real-time extraction? Is web scraping API hassle-free web scraping service? Plenty of questions may not help you to find which services to choose. You will be more confused and end up with no conclusion.
So, here is an article that will help you choose the best web scraping category to choose for your business – Scraping Scripts Vs Custom Web Scraping Vs Web Scraping API.
Let us give you an understanding that when and how each web scraping method may help you decide to opt with.
Web Scraping Scripts / Crawlers
The major changes that have come about from the rise of Internet have given birth to untouched sectors. Web Scraping or Data Crawling is one of the most prominent parts of the new born technology in the 21st century. Web scraping is a method or technique to extract data from the web and store in a structured format. This extracted data could be used in multiple ways for any types of business, depending on the needs of the company.
In order to effectively web scrape, you need to utilize a high-quality rotating proxy. When you scrape the data from the internet, rotating proxy serves better to assign a different IP address for each connection when web scraping. This will help you giving a seamless performance without being blocked or interrupted by any websites. Many industries leverage the web scraping technique. But one of the top industries that utilize scrapped data is social media marketing. Social media marketing companies scrape and extract numerous websites to understand user sentiments, current trends/affairs, news, and feedbacks. Thus, it helps to create a marketing campaign and business tactics for their business.
- Python is the best and widely used language to crawl the data. Scrapy is a free and open source web crawling framework, written in Python. Scrapy is useful for web scraping and extracting structured data which can be used for a wide range of useful applications, like data mining, information processing or historical archival.
- If your project needs frequent data, then web scraping scripts is the perfect solutions for your needs. It is suitable for recurring extractions, but not for ad-hoc or once off requirements.
- If you are having a fix and limited budget and do not wish to pay recurring costs for Data as a Service, then web scraping scripts will help you in project.
- Data privacy is the major factor while scraping and delivering the data. It doesn’t allow full control of piracy of data. So, the data is completely safe and secure with the service provider.
- Since web scraping script is deployed by the user side, it allows full control on crawling operations for your project.
- If you have multiple projects to crawl and running out time, the best thing would be to hire a web scraping service provider. The web scraping service provider has a bunch of talents, experienced crawlers and great infrastructure, it has an in-house team to maintain the scrapers, cop up with website structural changes, coping with complex websites. So whichever data you want to scrape, could be done easily.
- Cloud servers and proxies play a vital role while scraping a huge amount of web pages on the web. However, some websites have integrated anti-scraping method, which may block IPs and proxies.
- Free proxies available on the internet are always abused and end up being in blacklists used by anti-scraping tools and web servers. If you are doing serious large-scale data extraction, you should pay for some good proxies. There are many providers who would even rotate the IPs for you.
- It allows tighter integration with your data platform which empowers customers with more customization control along.
- Webs scraping script is more reliable and usable if you are looking to fetch real-time data from the websites. When it comes to low-volume data or lookup types of jobs, web scraping script is suitable for your project.
Just like others, it also gives you data output format the way you want. - While the phase of web scraping, the transparency is maintained between customer and service provider.
It allows giving you the ownership of the code scrip for your web scraping project.
Web Scraping API (As-a-Service)
- The Web Scraping API Service is suitable when it requires real-time data extraction. The majorly web scraping API service is used for Hotel price monitoring, flight price monitoring, online travel monitoring, etc.
- Since it requires API calls to the server that hosts web scraping API, it allows tighter integration with your data platform.
- If your project needs multiple data and many times, then Web Scraping API is the perfect solutions for your needs. It is suitable for recurring extractions, but not for ad-hoc or once off requirements.
- Just like others, it also gives you data output format the way you want in JSON or XML.
- Data privacy is the major factor while scraping and delivering the data. It doesn’t allow full control of piracy of data. So, the data is completely safe and secure with the service provider.
- Custom Web Scraping API service provides the large pool of servers and proxies which gives you the hassle-free web scraping service.
Custom Web Scraping Service
- If you have any type of project and wish to extract few, several or huge numbers of data from the web, then Web Scraping service is the perfect solution for your needs. It is suitable for recurring extraction, and also ad-hoc or once off requirements.
- This web scraping service is suitable when it requires aggregating multiple of data from thousands of website and needing a dedicated and experienced team to handle the large scale operation and maintain the scrapers, coping with complex sites.
- Web scraping service comes up with a no-fixed budget for project as it always requires more budgets and funding for data platform. It costs you more than you expect. So for this, outsourcing has more benefits than developing in-house.
- Web Scraping Service provides the large pool of servers and proxies which gives you the hassle-free web scraping service.
- Just like others, it also gives you data output format the way you want in JSON or XML.
Data privacy is the major factor while scraping and delivering the data. It doesn’t allow full control of piracy of data. So, the data is completely safe and secure with the service provider. - It doesn’t allow full control on crawling operations. Here, the customer has to make a change request to support team requiring changes the way the scraping is done or data output format requires changes.
- Transparency – allows full transparency but depends on the web scraping service providers if and how they reveal about the strategies being used for scraping desired data.
- It doesn’t give ownership of the code script. The user has to mention in contract documentation about the code ownership if they want. Web scraping service is only suitable for recurring and large scraping.
- It allows tighter integration with your data platform. You have to specify the data format and cloud or FTP locations where data feeds needs to be uploaded.

Conclusion
Right now after reading this article, you may have definitely some idea what kind of web scraping services may help you out for your business. Is scraping scripts service is the right for you? Or will custom web crawling service let your business to generate revenue? Or is that web scraping API you’re looking for? Well, your all unanswered questions must be answered by understanding your requirements and business purpose at X-Byte Enterprise Crawling. Reach us and let us help you out by clearing your doubts and choosing the best web scraping service method Scraping Scripts or Custom Web Crawling Service or Web Scraping API for you. Connect with us to know more!