what is web scraping?
fetching web pages with a program and pulling structured data out of them.
at its simplest it is an http get and a parser. what makes it hard is everything defending the page: ip reputation checks at the edge, tls and browser fingerprinting, rate limits, captchas, and markup that changes without warning. so a working scraper is mostly plumbing around the fetch. a proxy pool for source diversity, retries with backoff, session handling, caching so you never fetch the same url twice, and monitoring that tells you when selectors break rather than silently writing nulls. the legal picture is not uniform. public data, personal data, terms of service, copyright and computer misuse law all interact and vary by country, so treat permission as a question to answer per target rather than once. operationally, be cheap to be hosted by: honour robots where you can, cache aggressively, throttle per host, and identify yourself when you have no reason not to. myx sells the bandwidth side of this; residential lite at $0.30/gb is the usual high volume choice.