VPS for Scrapebox 2

[Potatoe]

It's been ages since I powered up scrapebox and I'm curious to check out version 2. I don't need it for posting or anything, just for scraping... and I'm on a mac now, so I need to grab a windows VPS. Curious how small of a box I can get away with for scraping, anyone have experience with this? Scrapebox's site recommends PowerUpHosting who have dedicated scrapebox servers starting at about $15 for 1gb ram, unmetered bandwidth, 1 cpu, and another $10/mo for 10 semi-dedicated proxies.

I'd almost prefer something with metered bandwidth since I've had some dreadfully slow experiences with unmetered in the past, and I imagine I don't need much bandwidth for scrapebox anyways?

Just looking for a second opinion before I grab that since I'm kind of weary of "Recommended hosts" and not really sure what I even need for this.

Cheers thanks guys.

 

[Ryuzaki]

You're going to want unmetered bandwidth. You'll blow through 100's of GB's and on to TB's pretty quickly, especially if you tack on posting. I wouldn't worry too much about CPU and RAM, especially if you're only using 10 proxies. This means you're going to have to put a pretty heavy time delay on them to keep them from getting banned (and they aren't private so there's still a chance someone else will burn them out.) With 10 proxies, speed isn't going to be your issue. I wouldn't make bandwidth an issue. Their advice seems pretty sound from my experiences with scraping and hunting for linking opportunities (not auto-posting and filtering lists).

 

[Potatoe]

@Ryuzaki Cool thanks for the info, I'm basically looking to do a bit of light scraping to find link opportunities in my niche like you mentioned.

On that note: Is scraping for proxies still a 'thing'? That's how I used to find them, but it was kind of a nightmare so I ended up just buying 10 or 20 at a time from some guy on another forum but he disappeared.

 

[juliantrueflynn]

Check out Alpharacks.com or Winity.io for a windows VPS. Really cheap and haven't had any issues with them ever. I use them for other tools besides Scrapebox though so I needed bigger options.

Yea, proxies are still a thing too. People use public proxies for scraping and private for pulling metrics (typically). Advanced search operators can kill proxies quickly so people tend to use public for that part. You probably won't get too many proxy recommendations because that's something people tend to keep to themselves.

 

[turbin3]

I'm using PowerUpHosting for some of mine, and can recommend them. I've been nothing but happy with their service, and haven't had a single issue. I think I'm going on 2 years now with multiple VPS' from them.

Word of advice, if you're paying for proxies, especially private proxies, think long and hard before scraping Google. They've gotten extremely aggressive with banning entire IP ranges, and doing it very quickly too. Hell, I even have captcha issues just manually performing searches with various search operators, like complex site search operators to identify footprints. For them, I'd recommend finding some solid proxies, and set your crawl rate to slow, use plenty of proxies, etc. At least that's been my experience lately. Maybe I'm lazy but, I've just taken to scraping Bing and not worrying about it. They're easy, and if you're just after leads, link opportunities, etc. it's usually sufficient.

 

[Ryuzaki]

Hell, I even have captcha issues just manually performing searches with various search operators

I've been seeing this too. If I search about 10 straight up URLs too fast (to check indexing of some backlinks), I have to enter a captcha.

I can get to about four or five site: searches before I have to enter a captcha.

It's a funny place for them to crack down when I can think of a lot of other ways they could save a lot more cash (like not indexing complete garbage and spun content).

 

[turbin3]

Exactly. The whole time I'm like, "FFS, I'm just trying to check the current status of the indexing of my tens of millions of pages. Give me a friggin break!"