Long-running web scraping jobs can tie up your computer and leave you managing storage, blocked requests, and repeated data collection. Running those jobs in the cloud lets you close your laptop while the scraping continues on hosted servers.
1. Run scraping jobs without dedicated hardware
With the Agenty hosted scraping app, jobs run across multiple cloud servers using different IP addresses. You don’t need to install heavy, dedicated hardware or stay at your computer to keep the task running properly. You can close the app or shut down your laptop while the job continues on the server.
2. Scale to millions of records
Extracting millions of product or item records requires processing capacity and storage. Agenty’s auto-scaling servers provide storage and speed according to your project size and selected plan, allowing your web scraping jobs to scale to any dataset size.
Cloud-based web scraping automatically runs in the selected region to keep latency low and speed up large extractions. For jobs involving millions of records, it offers an alternative to the extensive manual effort needed to extract, transform, and load that data.
3. Avoid website blocks with distributed scraping
A website block can stop you from collecting the content you need. Deleting cookies is a common attempted fix, but repeating that process becomes impractical when you’re collecting a large dataset.
Cloud-based web scraping distributes the job across hundreds of servers and thousands of proxy nodes, rotating the work between them over time. This speeds up collection and provides a reliable way to avoid blocks and keep scraping uninterrupted.
4. Manage scraping agents from a phone or tablet
Scraping jobs can take hours, but managing them doesn’t have to keep you at your desk. With Agenty, you can use a desktop, phone, or tablet to create, edit, and delete your web scraping agents and URL lists, alongside other management functions.
You can also start and control scraping jobs from your mobile device.
5. Keep your database updated through the API
If the websites you scrape change frequently, your database needs fresh data to match. Integrating your existing system with the Agenty API brings changes and updates from the target website directly into your system, without needing extra help to obtain updated data.
6. Automate recurring data collection
Scheduling removes the need to start every scraping job manually or stay at your computer while it runs. It also frees up time for other business responsibilities.
Scheduling your web scraping job lets you collect source data at your chosen frequency, including hourly, weekly, or monthly, and receive it in your inbox.
7. Get an email when a job finishes
Crawling a large URL list can take time. Email notifications tell you when the job is complete, so you don’t have to keep checking its progress. This is especially useful for long-running jobs that collect large datasets.
8. Get expert support for difficult websites
Not every website is straightforward to scrape. Complex data structures, irregular HTML, latency, and IP blocking can disrupt a project. With open-source software or in-house tools, blocking can even stop the entire job, as discussed in blockage the whole scraping job.
A managed cloud hosted web scraping service includes expert support to help prevent these problems and address bugs encountered during scraping. The service should have patches readily available to keep jobs running smoothly.
9. Access scraped data across platforms and locations
Sharing consistent data across teams and overseas branches can be difficult when access depends on a particular machine. A cloud-hosted scraping application makes the application and its data accessible through an internet browser, whether you’re using Windows, Mac, or another platform, anywhere in the world.
That shared access makes a cloud-based web scraper an integral tool for businesses competing on data. An ecommerce team might use it for competitor price monitoring, while a machine learning business might collect data to train its algorithms.
10. Send data to other apps without writing code
Every business has its own tools and ways of using data. A cloud-based scraper needs to connect with those workflows rather than leave the results isolated.
Integrations with services such as Zapier and IFTTT let you transfer scraped data to third-party apps without writing code.
Data quality and volume still matter
“War is ninety percent information.” ~Napoleon Bonaparte
The quote remains relevant across eras, including today, when a major portion of the world’s population is online and businesses use public data from every area of life. Your data collection tools need to meet both quality and volume requirements. Agenty is designed to meet those needs and give you the data to stay ahead of competitors.