Some people ask us if we are a “service” or a “software”. We simply tell them – we are a service, with killer software that runs behind the scenes! 🙂 Also, lot of our customers ask us, why go for a Web Crawling Service over a Web Crawling Software? The answer is pretty straight forward. Both solutions have their own advantages. The most important issues that help in deciding are:
- Time and Resources
This is probably the most important factor. Running your own simple web crawler may not be that difficult. You can find a web crawling software that runs right off your desktop. But you will have to do a some configuration on the software and you will need to be pretty well versed with technical jargon such as Xpath, Regular Expressions etc. Also, do you have the time to deviate from your company or product’s end goal and spend your time learning how to write or work with crawlers? Probably not. - Scalability and maintenance
Running your own crawler or running a web crawling software from your desktop may not be scalable. What if you need to crawl a 10000 different pages or links? Will that be scalable? What about technical problems? Do you have the network bandwidth to do this on a bigger scale? There are many unseen hassles when it comes to crawling the web. Web crawlers are known to break when the site being crawled changes – you will also need to take maintenance into consideration.
If you are think the above matters to you or your business, then Service is definitely the wiser choice. At Grepsr, we have designed our system to handle both the scenarios above. Our core focus is providing our customers with just the processed final data and hiding all the technical details involved. We run our crawlers in the cloud and it is highly scalable according to your requirement.