Where and how to host scrapers: VMs, containers, or managed platforms. Balance cost, IPs, and uptime for Apify Actors and long-running automation jobs.
Where you host scrapers, VMs, containers, or managed platforms, shapes cost, IP reputation, and uptime. These guides cover the options and how to balance them for crawlers and automation jobs.
Managed platforms remove ops overhead, while self-hosted VMs give control over IPs and cost. Many teams run Apify cloud actors alongside their own infrastructure. Below you will find hosting comparisons and setup guides.
Short answer: Liquid Web for infrastructure workloads (VPS, dedicated, GPU, HIPAA). Nexcess for managed application workloads (WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, Drupal). Both brands share the same parent company, the same 24/7 support staff, and the same uptime SLA — what differs is the stack underneath.
This article is the canonical routing decision for every other guide on this site that mentions both brands. Bookmark it or link to it when someone asks "which one should I use?"
The best VPS for web scraping in 2026 depends on your budget, target volume, and support needs. Hetzner and Vultr offer the lowest cost per GB RAM. Liquid Web wins on support and IP reputation. DigitalOcean suits teams that want strong docs and predictable billing.
Running web scrapers in Docker on a Liquid Web VPS gives you reproducible builds, easier deploys, and isolation from the host. This guide covers VPS choice, Docker install, a Playwright-based Dockerfile, and a docker-compose stack for scraper + Redis + cron.
Dedicated servers make sense for web scraping when you need predictable performance, multiple dedicated IPs, or high sustained bandwidth. Liquid Web offers dedicated hardware with 24/7 support. For most teams, a VPS is enough.
This guide walks you through provisioning a Liquid Web VPS, connecting via SSH, installing Node.js or Python, configuring a firewall, and deploying a scraper with cron scheduling.
For web scraping, DigitalOcean suits small teams that want strong docs and per-second billing. Liquid Web suits teams that want 24/7 phone support, managed hosting, and US-focused infrastructure.
Combine Liquid Web managed WordPress with Make.com to automate content pipelines: scrape with Apify, transform, and publish to WordPress via the REST API.
A self-hosted price monitoring system on Liquid Web needs a scraper, storage, a scheduler, and alerting. This guide outlines the architecture and implementation options.
Running Playwright on a VPS requires Node.js, Chromium and its system dependencies, and a headless config. This guide covers setup on Ubuntu/Debian (e.g. Liquid Web or any provider).
Crawlee is Apify’s open-source crawling library. It handles queues, retries, anti-bot fingerprinting, and storage. This guide covers deploying Crawlee on a Liquid Web VPS for production scraping.
Apify Cloud is the most complete managed option with scheduling, storage, and proxies included. Self-hosted options include VPS on DigitalOcean or Linode, containerized deployments on Kubernetes, and serverless functions on Lambda or Cloud Run for lightweight scrapers. Choose based on volume, latency requirements, and team DevOps capacity.
Self-host when you have strict data residency requirements, unusually high volumes that make per-compute pricing expensive, or specialized hardware needs like GPUs. Apify Cloud wins for most teams due to included scheduling, proxy rotation, storage, and zero infrastructure management. Factor in engineering time, not just compute costs.
Use Docker Swarm or Kubernetes to distribute actor containers, a Redis-backed request queue for URL management, and shared object storage for results. Monitor CPU and memory per worker to find the right concurrency per instance type. Dedicated VPC and firewalls protect scraping infrastructure from external access.
AWS EC2 Spot Instances reduce cost for batch jobs. GCP Compute Engine and Azure VMs are comparable. Choose regions with low latency to your target sites for better browser performance. Object storage (S3, GCS) is standard for large dataset archiving. Cloudflare Workers suit lightweight proxy relay use cases.
