What is Cloudflare? How to bypass its restrictions?

In today's Internet era, data capture has become an essential method for optimizing business decisions in all walks of life. From finance, e-commerce to medical and logistics industries, data capture provides important value and help for decision-making support for various companies.

However, in the actual data collection process, we often encounter the problem of data collection failure due to strict website protection. This is because most websites use protection against network robots (web crawlers), and many websites use protection measures provided by Cloudflare or similar networks. Before describing how to bypass such protection, let's first understand Cloudflare and its related functions.

Ⅰ.What is Cloudflare

Cloudflare is one of the largest networks running on the Internet . As a large network of servers , Cloudflare can improve the performance , security , and reliability of any device connected to the Internet , block DDoS attacks and malicious robots, close zero-day and other vulnerabilities, cache and accelerate content, manage APIs , and more.

Ⅱ. Cloudflare ’s robot management

Robot management refers to blocking harmful or malicious Internet robot traffic while still allowing useful robots to access web assets. That is to say, Cloudflare will not block all robots "across the board". For example, if some normal search engine robots are blocked, they will not be able to index web pages, and web pages will not be displayed in search results, which will cut the website's natural traffic in vain.

To do this, bot management detects bot activity, identifies the reputation of bots , analyzes bot behavior, challenges possible bots using CAPTCHA tests, JavaScript injections, or other methods, and identifies the sources of some harmful activity.

Ⅲ. How to bypass Cloudflare ’s blocking

1. Use a proxy service

Cloudflare 's robot management function will identify the source of the IP address and analyze and judge it based on the reputation of the IP . Therefore, it is very important to use a stable, secure, and clean IP for access. Using a high-quality proxy service can effectively reduce the chance of being identified as malicious access. For example, IPFoxy is a proxy service provider that can meet the needs. It provides a variety of IP types, abundant quantities, high purity, few geographical restrictions, and efficient and stable connections.

2. Follow the instructions of Robots.txt

The Robots.txt file is a set of instructions for robots. It is included in the source files of most websites and is mainly used to manage the activities of benign robots such as web crawlers, because malicious robots are unlikely to follow these instructions. In a sense, the Robots.txt file is a " code of conduct " sign posted in public places such as swimming pools and community activity centers . The sign itself has no power to enforce the rules listed, but " decent " customers will follow the rules, while " undecent " customers may violate the rules on the sign and be expelled.

Any behavior of the robot that violates the website's terms of service or the website's Robots.txt rules will be considered malicious behavior. Obviously, complying with the signage rules will be more conducive to preventing Cloudflare from blocking or even banning it as malicious access.

3. Simulate normal user behavior.

Cloudflare 's protection mechanism for web crawling may include actions such as rate limiting. For real users who access the Internet, the speed at which they interact with websites is "normal". For example, a real human user cannot browse 100 web pages per second. Therefore, it is necessary to control the frequency of network requests to avoid "unreasonable" request frequencies and traffic pressures that may cause Cloudflare 's protection mechanism to block them.

Although Cloudflare 's protection function is very powerful, the use of reasonable and efficient methods can still reduce the risk of interception, so that data capture can proceed smoothly.