Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Monitoring a Scraping Pipeline: The Metrics That Tell You It's Breaking Before Your Data Does
A scraper fails silently: the cron fires, the logs say 200, the data goes wrong. The metrics and alerts that catch it in the pipeline, not the boardroom.
Chris Collins · August 4, 2026 The State of Web Scraping in 2026
AI made data collection strategic, anti-bot went network-level, blocks turned invisible, pricing shifted to bandwidth. Where web scraping stands in 2026.
James Meadow · August 3, 2026 How to Use Residential Proxies in C# with HttpClient
Proxies in C#: WebProxy with NetworkCredential, SocketsHttpHandler and PooledConnectionLifetime, IHttpClientFactory, and per-identity clients for geo rotation.
Chris Collins · August 2, 2026 Build vs Buy: Should You Run Your Own Scraping Infrastructure?
A demo scraper takes an afternoon. Running it at scale is a product. A framework for what to build, what to buy, and the one layer to always rent.
Chris Collins · August 1, 2026 How to Tell When a Site Is Serving You Fake or Blocked Content
The dangerous scraping failure is not the 403 you can see, it is the 200 OK full of junk. How to detect soft blocks, honeypots, and poisoned data.
Chris Collins · July 31, 2026 Introducing Automatic Wallet Top-Up
Set a threshold and refill amount, and your Shifter wallet refills itself so usage-based charges never pause your proxies. Monthly cap, off anytime.
James Meadow · July 30, 2026 How to Use Residential Proxies in Node.js with Axios and Got
Proxies in Node.js: why Axios needs https-proxy-agent and proxy:false, Got's agent option, undici's ProxyAgent for fetch, and per-request geo rotation.
Chris Collins · July 29, 2026 How to Scale Residential Proxy Scraping Workloads with Kubernetes
Run scraping on Kubernetes: proxy creds as Secrets, per-pod session identity via the Downward API, queue-driven autoscaling, and graceful shutdown.
Chris Collins · July 28, 2026 Web Scraping Best Practices: How to Collect Data Without Harming the Sites You Scrape
Responsible web scraping: honor robots.txt, rate-limit, back off on 429s, cache, and scrape off-peak. Being a good citizen also gets you blocked far less.
Chris Collins · July 27, 2026