Cloud Scraping vs Local Scraping: Which Is Right for You?

Scaling a web scraping operation from 1,000 to 100,000 pages transforms a simple script into a complex infrastructure challenge, demanding more servers and operational work, while increasing infrastructure costs and presenting difficulties with target site blocking. Local scraping offers full control over the process but requires manual maintenance, making it suitable for small-scale operations with fewer than 1,000 pages, whereas cloud scraping, such as Bright Data, provides a managed solution that automatically handles IP rotation, retries, and JavaScript rendering, effectively reducing costs by up to 70% for operations exceeding 10,000 pages. Cloud scraping shifts infrastructure ownership away from the user, enabling scalable, reliable, and low-maintenance data extraction, making it a preferable choice for high-volume, protected sites, and situations where scraping is crucial to business operations.