Guides, research, and case studies on web scraping, price monitoring, and data delivery for analytics, marketing, and product needs.
How to pick a web scraping proxy in 2026: verified August prices per GB and per IP, datacenter vs ISP vs residential vs mobile, the session syntax vendors actually document, and what the NetNut seizure changed about buying residential IPs.
Back up an MS SQL Server database properly: recovery models, the T-SQL BACKUP command with ZSTD compression in SQL Server 2025, backup to S3 and Azure Blob, Agent and Ola Hallengren scheduling, and a restore drill. Versions and prices read 10 August 2026.
Anti-scraping plugins for WordPress reviewed against the plugin directory and vendor documentation in August 2026: what each one does to a scraper, where it stops working, and the four addresses that expose your content by default.
How to pull data from web APIs instead of HTML: finding the endpoint a page already calls, auth, cursor and offset pagination, 429 handling and retries. With measured byte and parse costs against HTML, client versions checked in August 2026, and the rate-limit header that no standard actually defines.
Async scraping with asyncio and aiohttp, rechecked 10 August 2026 against aiohttp 3.14.3: measured throughput, the default 100-connection cap, parser benchmarks and the Retry-After bug.
How audio CAPTCHAs are solved: template averaging on a fixed digit library, correlation search, and speech recognition. With measured January 2026 bypass rates against Google, GeeTest, MTCaptcha and telephone audio, per-solve prices read on 10 August 2026, and benchmark numbers for the correlation step.
PHP cURL behind a login, rerun on 10 August 2026 against PHP 8.4.21 and libcurl 8.5.0: cookie jars, CSRF tokens, the curl_close() trap that silently drops the session, HTML5 parsing, and the point where a headless browser becomes the only option.
Web scraping best practices rechecked in August 2026: robots.txt under RFC 9309, a Python stdlib parser that got three rules of four wrong until May 2026, Retry-After, Decimal money, and measured storage and parsing costs for a ten-thousand-page run.
Python web scraping libraries with verified August 2026 versions and release dates, a measured parser comparison, the packages that have gone quiet, and equivalents for JavaScript, PHP, Go, C#, Java, Ruby and Rust.