If you're using headless Chrome to aggregate data, or automate a repetitive task, chances are you'll likely have ran into the need for a proxy. A proxy is a "exit node" for web browsing wherein your requests for HTML, JavaScript, and more go through a different IP address than the host machine. This can be beneficial for several use-cases primarily with scraping data on the internet. browserless has long supported bringing your own proxy, but has never offered a native solution itself. Starting today, any paid cloud plans can now proxy through residential IPs on browserless.io.
How to get started
First you'll need to sign-up for a paid cloud-unit plan here. Sorry, proxying isn't available on free plans or Dedicated just yet. After you get your API-token there's three query parameters that you'll want to add to your REST API or library connect calls:
?proxy=residentialThis tells browserless to proxy all Chrome's requests through a residential proxy. Datacenter support is coming soon!?proxyCountry=usProxying should be handled via an IP address in the United States Country. Any ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 country code should work!?proxyStickyUse the same exit IP for all Chrome's requests for the current session. This is optional but mimics real user traffic so it's recommended.
Once set, browserless will fire up Chrome and have it proxy all it's network requests through a residential IP. All your favorite features still work like network-request interception, rejecting resource types like images, and injecting other scripts/code. It really is quite magic!
How much does residential proxy cost on browserless?
There's no need to purchase time or chunks of data. Instead, we instrumented our cloud-unit cluster to watch network traffic and consume extra units of time based on the sites' footprint. Each megabyte of traffic uses 6 units, or $0.01/MB on our least-expensive tier. Costs can be driven down by utilizing a higher-capacity paid plan or by talking with our sales team.
You can further drive down the number of megabytes transferred by using Puppeteer's network request rejection, enabling ad-block, and using other features Chrome offers. The fewer bytes Chrome has to download the less traffic flows through the residential proxy, thus saving quite a bit.
Are you offering more proxy types other than residential on browserless?
We're working on adding support for DataCenter proxies as they're significantly cheaper (and faster) than residential proxies. However, due to their popularity, residential proxies were our top choice for the first proxy feature.
You're also free to continue to use third-party proxies that suit your needs and functionality. Let us know if you need help finding a suitable one.
Where can I find out more?
Keep an eye on our documentation site for examples, but also feel free to reach out to us here!