Why *not* scrape yourself

Before you get all kinds of ideas about what the topic of this article means – please look at the context – We are talking about Web Scraping here !

This post will talk about reason why not to do this yourself and why to call in a professional (wink wink – use ScrapeHero)

You see some data that is publicly available and you start thinking about the possibilities of what you could do with it.
A brand new use, maybe the idea for a new startup, maybe a way to improve your existing business, reduce costs, get a leg up in your competition – the ideas just keep pouring in.
The possibilities are really endless.

Now you are excited and start to wonder how you can get this data in a structured format and actually use it.

Google to the rescue – you type in a few keywords around website data and start to see something about scraping – yes that is what I want.
You start to see a whole new world open up, tools, programmers, software, programming languages, do it yourself websites.

Now your head is spinning. You take a deep breath and revisit this whole thing the next day.

You wake up clear-headed the next day and feel like you are up for the challenge – you read up some more.
Start to spend money on getting cloud based servers, calculate bandwidth costs, figure out that you need a lot of servers to get any decent scraping done in a reasonable amount of time.
You add up the costs and they do add up – add up to a lot.

Then you wonder if you will be able to wake up every morning raring to go and scrape away – is that what you really want?
Is that what you really want to do day in and day out every day?

Probably not.

The simple answer is “scraping it yourself” is more like a DIY home project for people who have the skills AND the time and consider it as a relaxing hobby (excludes the majority of this blog’s readers).

If you need data for your business – day in and day out – call the Pros – “Better Call ScrapeHero!“