From the VStock Data Team
Engineering deep-dives, legal guides, and real-world use cases.
Headers, Pagination, and CAPTCHAs: The Three Walls of Web Scraping
The three things that block most scrapers — HTTP headers, pagination patterns, and CAPTCHAs — with concrete patterns for handling each.
Web Scraping with Scrapy: Spiders, Pipelines, and Rotating Proxies
A working Scrapy project: spiders, item pipelines, rotating proxies, and the Scrapy-Playwright bridge for JavaScript-heavy targets.
Web Scraping with curl: When the Right Tool Is Just curl
Practical curl patterns for fetching pages and APIs from the command line — and when to graduate to Python or Playwright.
Selenium Web Scraping Tutorial: A 2026 Practical Guide
Selenium 4, undetected-chromedriver, login flows, proxies, and the realistic limits of Selenium against modern anti-bot.
Web Scraping with Playwright: A Practical 2026 Tutorial
Install, render JavaScript pages, handle infinite scroll and login flows, manage proxies, and avoid the common anti-bot pitfalls.
Best Web Scraping Tools in 2026: An Honest Category Guide
Frameworks, no-code tools, scraping APIs, or managed services? A practical guide to picking the right web scraping tool for your team — without the affiliate-driven rankings.
API vs Web Scraping: When to Use Which
What each one actually is, when an official API is enough, when scraping is the only option, and how the two are usually combined in production data pipelines.
How We Bypass Cloudflare, CAPTCHAs, and Anti-Bot Walls
A deep-dive into the technical approach behind VStock Data's anti-bot bypass stack — rotating proxies, browser fingerprinting, and why most open-source scrapers fail.
Is Web Scraping Legal in 2026? A Practical Guide
From the hiQ v. LinkedIn ruling to GDPR's impact on data collection, we break down what's actually legal, what's a grey area, and how VStock Data keeps you covered.
E-Commerce Price Monitoring at Scale: Lessons from 50M+ SKUs
Real-world patterns we've seen while building price-monitoring pipelines for retail and marketplace clients — including how to handle rate limits, SKU drift, and site redesigns.