Without proxies, there is a limit to the number of requests the automation tools provided by Phantombuster can send. Exceed those limits by using the proxies discussed below.
Phantombuster provides social media automation and data scraping tools for non-technical people. With this, you do not need to learn how to write a line, leverage the full power of the web, and scrape data from it for your business need. Many marketers have been using tools provided by Phantombuster to either automate their actions on social media or scrape data from them. Unlike some other cloud-based automation tools that provide proxies for their users to use, Phantombuster provides their proxies, also supports 3rd HTTP Proxies.
You have to provide them yourself or risk getting banned and wasting time allocated to you based on your subscription. When it comes to using 3rd HTTP proxies with Phantombuster, I will advise you to go with residential proxies and I will be recommending 5 tested and trusted proxy providers with proxies that work well with PhantombusterPhantoms.Before that, let take a look at why you need proxies.
Why You Need Proxies for Phantom
You might be wondering why you need proxies for Phantom tools to work effectively?
Well, Phantom does two things – automation and data scraping! social automation from sites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and many others.
The sites it supports are all complex websites with strict anti-spam systems in place and in case you do not know, any form of automation and scraping not done through the official APIs is not allowed by these sites.
If they observe a lot of requests coming from a particular IP, they tend to block such IP. With proxies, the real IPs of Phantombuster are hidden and you can use a good number of IPs to mask the fact that your requests are coming from the same system. This will help you exceed the limit and scale-up, allowing you to scrape an unlimited amount of data.
Best Proxies for Phantombuster
Bright Data (Luminati)
- IP Pool Size: Over 72 million
- Locations: All countries in the world
- Concurrency Allowed: Unlimited
- Bandwidth Allowed: Starts at 40GB
- Cost: Starts at $500 monthly for 40GB
Bright Data Formerly Luminati proxy service, Their residential proxies remain our recommended proxies for accessing complex websites. This is because their proxies are not only fast but also secure, and they performed excellently well in our site compatibility tests. Luminati is the largest proxy network in the market.
Bright Data has proxies in all countries in the world and also has proxies in thousands of cities around the world; with this, you can target specific locations down to city-targeting level. currently, Luminati has over 72 million residential proxies. they have the best session control ever in the industry and as such, you can finetune it to suit your unique use case.
Smartproxy
- IP Pool Size: Over 10 million
- Locations: 195 locations across the globe
- Concurrency Allowed: Unlimited
- Bandwidth Allowed: Starts at 5GB
- Cost: Starts at $75 monthly for 5GB
Smartproxy is one of the premium proxy providers you can use their proxies together with Phantombuster to automate your social media tasks or scrape data from the web. Their pricing is geared toward both small marketers and the big ones too.
They have proxies in about 195 countries and in 8 major cities. Their proxies can be categories into two – high rotating proxies and sticky proxies that maintain sessions a while. For those with a smaller budget, I will advise they go with Smartproxy because of their micro plan.
Proxy-cheap
- IP Pool Size: over 6 million
- Locations: Worldwide location coverage
- Cost: $5 per GB monthly
Proxy-cheap has the cheapest residential proxies in the market among providers that their plans are priced based on bandwidth. Proxy-cheap does not have any minimum monetary requirement as low as 1GB from them.
However, their pricing becomes cheaper as you pay for more bandwidth – you can get the price by Gigabyte to reduce to $3 if you buy 200GB or more from them. They have got over 6 million residential proxies. their proxies are located in a good number of locations around the world. They sell mobile proxies and IPv6 datacenter proxies too.
Stormproxies
- IP Pool Size: 40,000
- Locations: the US and EU region only
- Concurrency Allowed: only one device per port
- Cost: Starts at $50 monthly for 5 ports
Stormproxies is a unique provider on the list. Unlike the other providers that their pricings are based on consumable bandwidth, Stormproxies do not price their proxies based on bandwidth.
They are based on ports and as such, they allow their users to enjoy an unlimited bandwidth but with a restriction on the number of threads that can be created, depending on the plan you choose. their proxies are some of the proxies that are pocket-friendly and cheap.
GeoSurf
- IP Pool Size: Over 2.5 million
- Locations: 130 countries
- Concurrency Allowed: Unlimited
- Bandwidth Allowed: Starts at 38GB
- Cost: Starts at $450 monthly for 38GB
GeoSurf is just like Luminati; they are both expensive and not affordable for beginners with a limited budget. However, when it comes to compatibility with many sites, you have to give it up to GeoSurf.
Their residential proxies have been tested on many websites and they have proven to work – They will work together with Phantombuster without any problem. They have proxies in most countries in the world and in thousands of cities around the world which makes geo-targeting possible.
How to Set Up Proxies on Phantombuster
As I stated earlier, for the full potentials of Phantombuster to be unleashed, you need to make use of proxies. to configure proxies on Phantombuster, follow the steps below.
- Go to the header and click on your name – then click on ‘Proxies.’
- Click the ‘+ New Proxy pool’ button and give it the name you want.
- Fill your proxy information and click on the ‘Add proxy’ button to save it
- To get the proxies to work, go to the seeing page and click on the 3 little dots; this will bring up the ‘Show advanced settings’ click it
- Scroll down to ‘Proxy’ and tick the ‘Random proxy from pool’ and click save.
FAQs on Phantombuster
What is Phantombuster?
Phantombuster is a cloud-based tool that provides you automation and data scraping tools for use with the popular social media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and even GitHub.
Read more, PhantomBuster: 10 Best PhantomBuster Alternatives for Automated Data Extraction
What Types of Proxies are Best for Phantombuster?
Phantombuster is not the problem here; the problem is the site you intend to automate your tasks on and scrape from. Most of these sites have strict anti-spam systems in place to check out for bots and proxy routed traffic. Because of this, residential proxies are the best proxies to use as datacenter proxies are easily detected.
Does Using Proxies Provide You Ultimate Protection?
No, it does not. While it provides you some level of anonymity, you have to be careful as the sites can still access your cookies and that can be used against you. However, you do not have any reason to worry, except for the requests you are sending are excessive.
Conclusion
The automation and web scraping tool provided have eased the work of Internet marketers, even without knowing how to write a single line of code, they can scrape data online and automate their tasks. However, you need proxies for them to function effectively. Use any of the proxies discussed above to unleash the full potentials of Phantombuster.
