Practical tips for polite, reliable public-data collection with residential IPs

Hello — I’ve been running small-scale public-data projects (price tracking, public directory crawling, geo-checking) and wanted to share a few practical rules I follow to stay respectful and reduce noise for the sites I query. Hoping people here can add suggestions or point out mistakes — curious about others’ workflows.

Key practices that helped me:

• Obey robots.txt and terms — treat robots.txt as the first filter and respect site rate limits when required.

• Throttle and randomize requests — fixed high-rate bursts are what cause blocks; short, randomized delays reduce impact.

• Use client-side caching — don’t re-request unchanged pages; cache responses to lower load.

• Rotate sessions sensibly — don’t churn IPs per request without reason; try session/behavior consistency where possible.

• Monitor failures and back off — when you see repeated errors or 4xx/5xx patterns, reduce activity and investigate.

• Be explicit about ethical boundaries — avoid scraping behind paywalls, private accounts, or data behind authentication unless you have permission.

• Share instrumentation tips — I log request latency and block rates per endpoint; plotting those quickly highlights problem pages.

If anyone here runs similar projects: what tooling or small checks do you add before scaling? Any lessons learned on polite geo-targeting or handling CAPTCHA-heavy pages?

— shared by a dev experimenting with respectful collection (resource: Nsocks)