What is Rate Limiting? | How to Avoid Rate Limiting with Proxies

What is Rate Limiting? | How to Avoid Rate Limiting with Proxies

Rate limits are a common headache. If you’ve ever tried web scraping or automation, you’ve probably encountered rate limiting. A rate limit is when a platform or website restricts the number of requests that can be made by a user to the server within a timeframe. Websites impose rate limiting to prevent system overloads and provide stability for regular users.

If you’re getting frustrated by rate limits, it’s time to invest in an affordable digital proxy. Understanding how rate limits work can help you navigate these restrictions in an ethical way to facilitate web scraping and automation.

Rotating residential proxies are one of the most popular ways to avoid rate limiting, while datacenter proxies offer a cheaper alternative for users with smaller data tasks. This guide covers everything you need to know about rate limits, including the most common types of rate limits and how to navigate them with proxy solutions.

What is Rate Limiting?

Rating limiting is a protocol used by APIs and websites to help manage their incoming traffic to prevent server disruptions and potential abuse, while ensuring fair use. This technology works by monitoring the number of requests the website’s server receives from an IP address within a specific time frame. Each website has its own rate limiting technology and restrictions.

Why Do Websites Use Rate Limiting?

Rate limiting might feel like a nuisance, but it exists to protect websites from excessive traffic and the problems associated with it. When a website experiences heavy traffic, it can lead to slow performance and unexpected downtime, negatively impacting the experience for regular users.

Websites use rate limiting to detect and block bots to ensure fair access to website resources. Managing requests through rate limiting protects a website’s server against potential DDoS attacks and ensures more consistent performance with better use of resources.

The Most Common Types of Rate Limiting

Websites have three objectives when implementing rate limiting: limiting the number of users, geographical access, and server limits. The most common type of rate limiting is user rate limits, where users who exceed the chosen rate limit are denied access to the website until the chosen rate limit timeframe is reset.

Websites can further optimize their server performance by implementing geographic rate limits. This type of rate limiting enables developers to utilize user behavior insights to implement a lower rate limit at times when users in that geographical area are less active. Alternatively, websites also implement rate limiting on the server level, providing developers with more flexibility by applying rate limits to specific servers.

On an implementation level, there are three common types of rate limiting:

Fixed Window Rate Limiting

One of the most popular forms of rate limiting is fixed window, which puts a limit on the number of requests that can be made within a given window by all users. For example, a server may limit the number of requests to 100 per minute. Therefore, the server will only be able to accommodate 100 requests between 10:00 and 10:01 with the window resetting at 10:02, allowing another 100 requests to be served. A fixed window rate limit can be implemented at either a user or server level.

Sliding Window Rate Limiting

By comparison, sliding window rate limiting is more flexible with a moving time window that changes in line with each access request. For example, if the server facilitates 100 requests per minute, the window will only reset one minute after the first user request.

Leaky Bucket Rate Limiting

Alternatively, a leaky bucket rate limiting system does not use a time frame to handle requests, but instead works on a first-come, first-serve basis to service access requests. You’ll often encounter this type of rate limiting in online queuing systems for concert tickets and new product drops.

Problems Rate Limiting Creates for Web Scraping and Automation

Rate limiting is a necessity for most websites and platforms to facilitate performance and enhance the user experience by minimizing downtime caused by increased traffic. However, rate limiting can cause major challenges for tasks like web scraping, multi-account management, and ad verification.

Without using a residential or datacenter proxy, your access to a website may be blocked or you might be unable to access geo-blocked content. High-volume tasks, like web scraping and social media monitoring, are more likely to hit the rate limit, making it easier for the website to identify you as a bot and restrict your account.

Encountering rate limits can be frustrating and delay your workflow, making it more difficult to access real-time data or conduct tasks like managing multiple accounts or scheduling posts.

How Residential and Datacenter Proxies Help Bypass Rate Limiting

What’s the best solution to navigating rate limiting? Using digital proxies. A proxy acts as a bridge between the user and a website server, concealing their original IP address and mimicking genuine user behavior to avoid detection. Proxies are either static, using one IP address, or rotating, automatically switching the IP address used with each request or after a chosen time frame.

Residential proxies and datacenter proxies are commonly used to overcome rate limiting, bypass restrictions, and geo-blocking. Using a proxy significantly reduces the likelihood that you’ll encounter a rate limit as it masks your true IP address by routing your request through other IP addresses to prevent detection.

What Type of Proxy is Best for Avoiding Rate Limits?

Residential proxies and datacenter proxies are the most popular options for avoiding rate limits. You’ll want to choose the type of proxy that best suits your specific needs, including your budget.

Residential proxies are more expensive as they provide you with an IP sourced from an Internet Service Provider (ISP), which is less likely to be detected than an IP address from a datacenter. These high-quality IPs may be more expensive, but they’re the best choice for high-volume tasks. By comparison, datacenter proxies are more affordable and operate faster, however, they are less reliable as they aren’t from an ISP.

Avoid Rate Limits with High-Quality Digital Proxies from Just $1.79

Rate limits are an unfortunate necessity for websites – and they can pose a genuine challenge for implementing data scraping activities and automation into your workflow.

You can avoid the headache of rate limits by using an affordable residential or datacenter proxy from DigiProxy, starting from just $1.79. Learn about more uses of digital proxies and get started with DigiProxy today to wave goodbye to rate limits.