Pros and Cons of DIY Web Scraping

Small-scale businessmen are increasingly looking toward data scraping for getting an edge over their competitors. Many of them try to save on costs by trying to scrape data themselves, even if they have zero coding knowledge. In this post, we’d look at the benefits and limitations of choosing to do web scraping yourself as against using  web scraping services.

How to scrape data yourself?

If you aim to scrape data yourself, the only way to do so is through web portals dedicated to the same. Most of them work on a subscription basis, where you can scrape the website(s) you want and get the data you expect. Moreover, some work on the freemium model, where you can scrape limited amounts of data from select websites for free.

Benefits of data scraping yourself

Fast and efficient- If you’d want to collect data online, it doesn’t make sense to do it manually as the whole process is time-consuming and cumbersome. Data scraping, on the other hand, is quick, and efficient and gets you data that makes sense within just a few hours. This could go a long way in making sure you can make informed business decisions.

Low costs- Subscriptions for data scraping are quite pocket-friendly. For a few hundred dollars you could scrape data that could help you generate relevant leads for your business. 

Reliable and robust performance- With online data scraping portals, you can be assured of accurate and reliable data that you could use for your business processes.

Limitations of data scraping yourself

Limited use- The scope of work needed for data scraping can vary for each requirement. The demands for data can be unlimited, but such data scraping portals have limited use. Many of them can scrape only a few Gigabytes of data which may or may not be enough for commercial use.

No data analysis- Scraping data yourself may give you a lot of data, but it’s useless unless you analyze it to make it useful for business decisions. Many times, data analysis requires you to have advanced knowledge of software like Excel or Microsoft Access. Not everyone could do this themselves.

Limited to easy scraping tasks- Data scraping from web portals has limited use, you could only do scraping for simple data as required. For more complex tasks, you would need to hire Data Scraping Services.

Why you should opt for custom data scraping services

No matter what your requirement is, only a professional data scraping service would be ideal for getting actionable data. To do data scraping at scale, you need professional coders who’d be able to retrieve data from the right sources. Besides this, data scraping isn’t the same for all websites- it depends on which platform the website is built, its size, its traffic, and many other factors. In fact, many websites do not even allow data to be scraped from them.

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For advanced scraping requirements, a whole team of professional coders is required to understand the requirements and prepare a detailed plan to carry out the scraping needs. After the data is retrieved, the next step is analyzing the data to meet the client’s requirements. For all of this, advanced cloud storage is needed and specialized skills are required for this. If you are looking for a custom data scraping provider, we recommend SmartScrapers. They’ve got the team, skills, and infrastructure needed to carry out all kinds of data scraping challenges as required.