Cloud Data Extraction vs Local Data Extraction

With the rising popularity of web scraping, the tools and technologies are getting more and more efficient and user-friendly. Data scraping service providers strive to offer the best scraping services and technologies. You do not worry about costly hardware maintenance, do not face network interruptions, and can access extracted data anytime. Yes, we are talking about cloud data extraction. Let’s compare the two types of data extraction on the local vs cloud server and learn the difference to choose the preferable option.

Cloud extraction is the possibility to access, extract, and analyze data stored on cloud servers.

When you are practicing cloud extraction, the crawlers run in the cloud using multiple servers with automatically rotated IPs which protect you from being blacklisted by the websites. As well, you do not use local hardware and are independent of OS. Data stored on cloud servers can be accessed anytime from anywhere.

Local extraction means running the crawler on your local machine. While practicing local extraction, you do not need cloud resources, and you may troubleshoot any workflow issues on time. In this case, if you are performing one scraping task, the local extraction will be faster than cloud extraction. But if you split your task into sub-tasks, it will be faster on the cloud server, as that time your task will be divided between several cloud servers, and this approach speeds up the extraction process.

To summarize the difference between cloud and local extraction, let’s review the following table:

Cloud web crawlers are programs that run on cloud servers. They aim to extract data from websites and store and organize it. Cloud online crawlers are usually third-party tools offering their services as packs of subscriptions. Examples are Octoparse, Jetoctopus, Netpeak Spider, etc.

In contrast to cloud data extraction, local crawlers run their asks on local servers. Those are custom tools that require an in-house development team and regular maintenance. However, it does not have so many restrictions and is cheaper in the long-term perspective.

At DataOx we are always happy to help you with advice on which options will be suitable for you based on your business needs. Schedule a free consultation with our expert and find out how web scraping can help your business grow regardless of the server type.