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Python Scraper: How to Annihilate 503 Errors and Win the Battle Against WAFs 🛡️ with a Stealthy Rotating Proxy ⚔️
While you were calmly scraping competitor sites super quickly, thanks to your rotating proxy, a nasty 503 error suddenly blocks your access to the coveted site… 🛡️
After some investigation, you realize it’s a WAF (Web Application Firewall): a nasty program trying to keep you away from your loot…
After spending five hours on it, I finally found a solution that works 🔪
Brew some coffee, fire up Vscode, and let’s get started…
503 Service Unavailable error
The 503 error in the context of Python web scraping is quite common… Especially when you’re speeding up your scraping with multi-threading and rotating proxies…
The target site, its host, or its CDN has taken measures to thwart all automated requests: the page is accessible via the browser, but neither curl nor requests seem allowed to retrieve the content.
The error I encountered requires reloading the page in Javascript. You might tell me it’s trivial with Selenium, but let me remind you that we want to use a proxy for more discretion and speed.
