The Good Tech Companies - How to Circumvent API Rate Limiting

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/how-to-circumvent-api-rate-limiting. Learn more about API rate limit measures and discover how to circumvent API rate limiting. Check more stories related to programming at: https://hackernoon.com/c/programming. You can also check exclusive content about #api, #proxies, #web-development, #api-rate-limiting, #api-keys, #good-company, #why-to-use-proxies, #web-proxies, and more. This story was written by: @brightdata. Learn more about this writer by checking @brightdata's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com. Most companies, social media platforms, and online services provide access to a subset of their data through public endpoints. If you send too many requests, you'll hit a rate limiter wall. Discover how to circumvent API rate limiting. Dive into the world of API rate limit measures and how they work.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. How to circumvent API rate limiting by bright data. These days, most companies offer public APIs you can access with a special token generated straight from their dashboard. Similarly, many online projects provide public endpoints to fetch data. The problem? If you send too many requests, you'll hit a rat limiter wall. Discover how to circumvent API rate limiting. Dive into the world of API rate limit measures. Learn what they are, how they work, and the tricks to get around them.

Ninja what's API rate limiting? API rate limiting is a handy technique used by web services to control the number of requests a client can make to their public endpoints within a specified time frame. Hourglass to better understand how this works. Imagine you're at a theme park on a sunny Saturday. Sun the park offers a refill station for soda cups, but there's a catch. You can only refill one cup every 10 minutes cup with straw. Why? To prevent chaos and ensure everyone gets a drink without hogging the fountain. That's exactly how API rate limiting works. Lightbulb think of an API rate limit as a speed limit for your data requests, keeping things in check. Stop sign it controls how often users can make requests to a server within a specific time frame. Wait, but why do web services even limit their APIs? The answer is straightforward. Web services limit their APIs to ensure answer is straightforward. Web services limit their APIs

to ensure ferricity, prevent abuse, avoid security issues like DDoS attacks, and maintain the overall performance and stability of their services. Man's superhero most companies, social media platforms, and online services provide access to a subset of their data through public endpoints. Is that really the best way to access their data? Thinking face not quite. For more insights, check out our article on web scraping versus API. To access those endpoints, all you need to do is sign up, create an API key, and use it to authenticate yourself against their public endpoints, as detailed in their documentation. Key sounds easy, right? Open mouth smile sure,

but there are other factors at play, just like API rate limiting. But why is that complex mechanism really necessary? Question mark question mark question mark imagine a few users start bombarding the servers with hundreds of thousands of requests per second. The servers would struggle to handle the load, causing slow downs for all users. Companies definitely want to avoid that, even for free public endpoints. Prohibited users typically aren't fans of downtime or slow services, especially if they are paying for access to those APIs flying money. To prevent that, web services implement API rate limit measures to restrict the

number of requests a specific user can make within a given time frame. Alarm clock you can usually find these API rate limiting policies in the provider's documentation. Here are some useful pages for popular web services with public APIs. GitHub API rate limiting policies. OpenAI rate limiting policies. Zoom API rate limits. What happens when you ignore API rate limits? For a rate limiter to work, the system needs to count all the incoming requests from a user. But how does it know it's the same user spamming those requests? Magnifying glass by keeping an eye on the user's API key or IP address, or both. That's how the server can track who's hitting up the web service. Now, keep in mind that API rate limit measures vary wildly from provider to provider.

Some cap you at x requests per y seconds with the same API key, while others slap on additional limits for requests from the same IP. There are even services that consider things like endpoint-specific quotas, regardless of the implementation, if you hit that limit, expect a 429 too many requests error response. Basically the server's way of saying, whoa there, slow down. Give others a chance too. Cold sweat smile hitting an API rate limit can range from a simple 429 error to a full blown IPBAN. Warning pro tip. Follow our guide on how to avoid an IP ban. And trust me, getting banned is no fun. It can bring your entire automation operation OR services relying on

those endpoints to a screeching halt. Fearful face API rate limit exceeded. What to do? How to circumvent API rate limiting? Explore the most effective ways. Pay more it's sad, but like most problems in life, you can just buy your way out of API rate limits. Explore the most effective ways. Pay more it's sad, but like most problems in life, you can just buy your way out of API rate limits moneybag. Companies profit by capping requests based on your plan tier. The more you pay, the more requests you can fire off, plain and simple. But let's be real, while this isn't exactly the most ethical or infinitely scalable solution, it makes sense from a business perspective. It's like paying for extra luggage on a flight. You want more room, you gotta cough up more cash.

Airplane create more API keys Some providers track your incoming requests by looking at the API key you use to authenticate. Since each API key has a limit on the number of requests it can produce in a given time frame, the magic trick here seems obvious. Create multiple API keys. Top Hat Sparkle's paying more for a plan is like scaling vertically, but the idea is to scale horizontally instead, creating multiple keys with different purposes and running them concurrently. Sounds foolproof, right? Well, not so fast, providers know that trick and have countermeasures in place. They can link each API key to an account, so the rate limit might count all requests from your account, not just individual keys. They could cap the number of API keys you can create. Want more keys? Pay more. They may also use IP-based rate limiting, preventing multiple keys from bypassing the limit.

Backslash dot. So yeah, the game is rigged. Pensive Face Use PROXIESA proxy server acts like a middleman between you and the web service's endpoints. It receives your requests, routes them to the target server, grabs the response, and sends it back to you. This way, the web server sees the requests coming from the proxy's IP, not your IP. Man-detective this mechanism lets you cloak your identity behind the proxy's server. Considering that top-tier proxy providers offer networks of millions of proxy IPs,

that's basically unlimited firepower. When providers enforce IP-based rate limits, proxies are your go-to solution for bypassing API rate limiting. High-voltage want to integrate proxies into your OS, browser, HTTP client, or scripts. Piece of cake, shortcake just a few clicks or a couple of lines of code, depending on your setup. For more guidance, follow our integration guides. If you're looking for the best proxy provider on the market, look no further than BrightData. Check out our proxy offerings or watch the video below to find the perfect fit for your needs and your wallet.

https://www.youtube.com.watch.v equals vui l5j2nr3u and embeddable equals true final thoughts. Now you know how to circumvent API rate limiting like a pro. Web services cap your requests to nudge you toward higher-priced tiers, but there's a trick up your sleeve. Proxy servers need to avoid blocks when hitting public APIs. Bright Data's suite of tools has go your back. Join the mission to make the internet accessible for all. Globe until next time, keep surfing the web with freedom. Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by Artificial Intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.