What Is Throttling? (Rate Limiting Requests)

There are two sides to throttling. Servers throttle you: rate-limit rules (per IP, per endpoint, or per account) cap how many requests they'll accept in a window, returning 429 or 503 once you cross the line. Your scraper throttles itself: capping concurrency and spacing requests out so you stay below those limits in the first place. Good scraping is mostly the second kind - pacing yourself so the server never has to.

Hammering a site with rapid-fire requests is one of the loudest bot signals there is. It trips soft blocks (429s) that escalate into hard IP bans if you keep pushing. Respecting rate limits - honoring the Retry-After header, backing off when you see 429s - keeps your access stable and your IPs clean. Throttling is the difference between a scraper that runs for months and one that's banned in an hour.

Set a sane concurrency limit, add delays with random jitter between requests, and apply exponential backoff when you hit a 429. Then distribute load across rotating proxies so each individual IP stays human-paced even as your total throughput rises. If you'd rather not tune all of this by hand, a web scraping API handles request pacing, proxy rotation, and retries for you.