Web data is a crucial component for competitor analysis, pricing intelligence, sentiment analysis and other new-age business growth activities. However, companies are still in a dilemma when it comes to choosing between different methods of extracting data from the web. While there are dedicated DaaS companies offering on-demand data as per the requirements, some companies still try to take the bumpy road of in-house crawling. To clear the air and help you make an informed decision, here is a detailed comparison between the cost points involved in in-house crawling and outsourcing.
In-house crawling
Servers
Given the resource intensive nature of the process, web crawling and extraction demands high end servers that can cope up with complex tasks continuously . It goes without saying that these high-end servers would also come with a cost. The irony is that it wouldn’t make sense to invest in such servers unless you are a data extraction company yourself.
Proxy services
Proxy services act as your access token while accessing websites that are geo-locked or have different versions for different locations. Subscribing to a proxy service is essential if you need to get around issues like IP blocking and location specific version issues. Since the speed of data extraction will also be impacted by the quality of the proxy service, DaaS providers use expensive proxy services.
Engineers
Hiring, training and retaining employees would not only incur cost, but also dilute the focus of your business. Since web crawling is complex process, it will be a challenging task to find skilled talent that can set up and execute the crawlers. Engineers will also be responsible for making changes to the setup in case of structural changes in the target sites.
Infrastructure maintenance and Upkeep
Web technologies change often and such changes require updating the crawling infrastructure. Some changes could also mean upgrading different paid tools that will always remain a part of the setup. Frequent updates and improvements should also be made to the infrastructure to keep the process smooth and improve the data flow.
Software tools
An extensive tech stack with efficient tools is integral to building a web crawling setup. Some of these tools come with a price tag and it adds up to the overall cost of the crawling process.
Monitoring Cost
Since the web is highly dynamic in nature, ensuring steady flow of data requires continuous monitoring of the crawling setup and data inflow. To achieve this, a monitoring setup must be built and deployed which again involves labor, resources, and software cost.
Data QA Cost
The whole point of web data extraction is to extract high quality data from the web to serve different business purposes. The quality of data will be a huge determining factor of your ROI from the whole data project. To ensure the data quality, you will have to employ a QA personnel.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing the data extraction process will free your time for the core business activities that you should be focusing on. Since you are getting the data in your desired format, the only task left for you would be to plug this data into your database or analytics system and start using it.
Cost per month for 5 sites and 100,000 records while crawling in-house
* Considers two dedicated in-house engineers and 20,000 records per site