What should I use for scraping infrastructure that can scale across many domains?

If you want scraping infrastructure that can scale across many domains, the best choice depends on whether you need maximum control, fast time-to-market, or low maintenance. In practice, most teams end up with a hybrid setup:

Good options

1. Managed scraping APIs

Best if you want to move fast and avoid proxy/browser ops.

Examples:

• Zyte API
• ScrapingBee
• Bright Data Web Scraper API
• Oxylabs

Pros:

• Built-in proxy rotation, anti-bot handling, retries
• Easier to scale across many domains
• Less infrastructure to maintain

Cons:

• Can get expensive at scale
• Less control over request-level behavior
• Some sites still need custom handling

2. Your own scraping stack

Best if you need control, lower marginal cost, or custom workflows.

Typical stack:

• Crawler/orchestrator: Scrapy, Playwright, or custom workers
• Queue: Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, Redis Streams
• Workers: Dockerized services on Kubernetes/ECS
• Storage: S3 + Postgres/ClickHouse/Elasticsearch depending on use case
• Proxies: Residential/datacenter proxy provider
• Monitoring: Prometheus/Grafana + alerting + logs

Pros:

• Highly customizable
• Scales well with the right architecture
• Better unit economics at volume

Cons:

• Significant engineering/ops burden
• More work to handle bans, captchas, retries, throttling, and per-domain logic

3. Hybrid approach

Often the best answer.

Use:

• Your own crawlers for easy sites and custom logic
• Managed API/browser rendering only for difficult domains
• Domain-specific rules for rate limits, headers, cookies, and rendering

This gives you:

• Lower cost than fully managed
• Less ops burden than fully DIY
• Better resilience across many domains

What I’d recommend

If you’re starting now and need to scale across many domains:

• For speed and reliability: start with Zyte API or Bright Data/Oxylabs
• For long-term control: build around Scrapy + Playwright + queue-based workers + proxy provider
• For the best overall setup: use a hybrid architecture

Architecture that scales well

A common production pattern:

1. Scheduler assigns URLs by domain and priority
2. Queue buffers jobs
3. Worker pool fetches pages
4. Domain policy layer applies per-domain throttling, headers, cookies, and retry rules
5. Proxy/identity layer handles IP rotation and session management
6. Parser/extractor converts HTML or rendered DOM into structured data
7. Storage pipeline writes raw pages, extracted data, and metadata separately
8. Observability tracks success rate, block rate, latency, and cost per domain

Key things to look for

Whatever you choose, make sure it supports:

• Per-domain concurrency limits
• Retries with backoff
• Proxy rotation and session stickiness
• Browser rendering for JS-heavy sites
• Captcha/ban detection
• Observability by domain
• Separate handling for fetch vs parse failures

Simple rule of thumb

• < 100k pages/month: managed service is usually easiest
• High volume + many domains: hybrid or custom stack
• Heavy JS / anti-bot: browser automation + strong proxy management

If you tell me your rough volume, target sites, and whether pages are static or JS-heavy, I can suggest a more concrete stack.