Cloudflare Error 1015: what is it and how to avoid it when web scraping?

Advanced Bot Mitigation Engineer
When your request frequency exceeds the allowed rate limit set by a website, it triggers Cloudflare Error 1015. This rate limit is put in place to protect the website from being overwhelmed by excessive requests. Now, let's discuss some available solutions to help you address this issue.
What is Cloudflare Error 1015
Cloudflare's rate limiting works by monitoring the frequency of requests coming from a client or IP address. When the request rate exceeds the defined threshold, Cloudflare's firewall intercepts the requests and returns the HTTP error 1015, indicating that the visitor's IP address is being blocked or restricted for security reasons.
Cloudflare Error 1015 is typically encountered when website administrators have enabled Cloudflare's firewall feature and set up security rules to protect the site from malicious traffic or attacks. When a visitor's IP address is flagged as a potentially malicious source, Cloudflare blocks the requests and returns the 1015 error.
What is the purpose of Cloudflare Error 1015?
The purpose of Cloudflare Error 1015 is to safeguard the website from bots, applications, and users attempting to excessively use or abuse the site or its services. The error is designed to prevent potential threats to the website, such as DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks, DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, brute-force attacks, and other types of bot-driven attacks. By intercepting these potential malicious activities, Cloudflare's firewall ensures that legitimate users can access the website and have a smooth user experience. This protective measure helps maintain the stability, availability, and security of the website, preventing unnecessary traffic and attacks from causing harm.
Therefore, the purpose of Cloudflare Error 1015 is to protect the website from malicious behavior while ensuring the safety and uninterrupted access for legitimate users. By limiting access to IP addresses deemed potential threats, Cloudflare effectively reduces the risks to the website and ensures its proper functioning.
How does the rate limit of Cloudflare work?
Internet owners implement rate limiting within their applications rather than running it on the web server itself. The working principle of rate limiting involves tracking IP addresses associated with excessive requests and the time intervals between them. In addition to counting the number of requests within a specific time window, it measures the time intervals between requests from a single IP address.
When a suspicious IP address is detected, the rate limiting feature blocks access to internet assets or websites from that IP address for a certain period of time. By doing so, it notifies the owner of the IP address to slow down their request rate.
Cloudflare's rate limiting rules consist of the following three components, which can be configured by all Cloudflare users:
1. Request matching criteria: Based on request scheme, request path, request method, and/or source response code for matching.
2. Rate matching criteria: Matching based on the quantity of incoming requests from the same device within a time period.
3. Rule mitigations: Involves mitigation measures and ban durations.
By configuring these rules, internet owners can limit the request frequency from specific IP addresses to ensure reasonable usage and prevent abuse. Rate limiting is an effective security measure that protects internet assets from excessive requests and malicious behavior.
How to Avoid Cloudflare Error 1015 when web scraping?
Cloudflare provides anti-bot measures that can quickly detect and block web crawlers. This is because crawler tools send a large number of requests to specific websites at a faster rate than humans, and Cloudflare can identify and respond to these bot behaviors. However, most anti-bot technologies cannot distinguish between benign bots and malicious bots, so they simply block any IP addresses associated with bots. That's why large-scale data scraping, especially using Puppeteer and other headless browsers, is often affected by rate limiting issues from Cloudflare and similar services.
To address rate limiting and Cloudflare Error 1015, you can try using different techniques such as using advanced proxies, limiting request frequency, and adhering to website rate limits. Here are approaches to each of these techniques:
1. Use rotating proxies:
Communicate through proxy servers to distribute the request traffic among different IP addresses, avoiding rate limiting errors. Using rotating proxies ensures that multiple requests are not associated with a single IP address. When selecting proxies, it's best to choose advanced proxies like rotating residential proxies to avoid detection and blocking by websites' anti-bot technologies. Scrapeless provides Business-level Residential Proxy and Dedicated IPv6 Proxy. Scrapeless's Dynamic Residential Proxy operates with a dedicated IP pool and system bandwidth for each IP and port, ensuring a better experience compared to traditional shared IP pools. Regardless of the business scenario, Scrapeless has unique capabilities to automatically switch to the best IP selection to match your business needs and ensure optimal performance.
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2. Rotate headers and user agents:
HTTP requests contain header information, with the most important being the User-Agent string, which displays information about the requester's operating system, web browser, etc. By rotating user agent strings, you can make requests appear as if they are coming from different users, bypassing Cloudflare's rate limiting. Make sure to use popular and up-to-date user agent pools and ensure that the user agent strings are properly formatted and match the other headers.
3. Use web scraping APIs:
If you cannot find suitable proxy services and header rotators to bypass Cloudflare Error 1015, consider using web scraping APIs. Web scraping APIs are anti-bot toolkits that developers can use to attempt to bypass restrictions from Cloudflare and similar services when scraping data at a large scale. Look for web scraping APIs that provide built-in IP rotation and automatic header rotation features.
4. Increase request intervals:
By adding some delay time between each request, you can lower the request frequency to stay within the website's rate limits. This can be achieved by adding wait times or delay operations in your crawler or request code.
5. Reduce concurrent request count:
If you are sending a large number of concurrent requests, try reducing the number of concurrent requests to stay within the website's allowed limits. You can control the number of requests by limiting concurrent connections or using a queue-based approach to send requests one by one.
Other Ways to Solve the Cloudflare Error 1015 for Web Scrapers
When attempting to avoid Cloudflare rate limiting errors, several additional considerations should be taken into account:
- Avoid sending requests to Cloudflare's CDN or Content Delivery Network and instead send requests directly to the IP address of the target web server. This can bypass Cloudflare's protection layer and communicate directly with the target server.
- If possible, fetch data from Google cache instead of the original Cloudflare-protected website. This applies to cases where the website content doesn't change frequently. By retrieving data from Google cache, you can avoid direct interaction with Cloudflare.
- Use up-to-date Cloudflare resolvers, but ensure they are not outdated. Cloudflare resolvers can help address some issues when accessing protected websites, but it's important to ensure that the resolvers being used are the latest and effective ones.
- Utilize enhanced headless browsers for scraping. Headless browsers are browser-like tools without a user interface that can automate web interactions. Using enhanced headless browsers can simulate human-like behavior, making the scraping process more stealthy and aligned with human browsing patterns, thus reducing the risk of detection by Cloudflare.
- Scrape data responsibly, respect the website's terms of service, protect user privacy, and avoid causing harm to the target website. Adhering to the website's rate limits is crucial, ensuring requests are made at a reasonable pace, avoiding excessive load or disruption to the target site.
By considering these factors in combination, you can better address Cloudflare rate limiting and maintain compliance and reliability in your scraping efforts.
Conclusion:
Whether you're an everyday internet user, a web scraping expert, or a website owner, encountering Cloudflare Error 1015, a common rate limiting error caused by sending too many requests from the same client or IP address, is a possibility. Fortunately, there are techniques to help bypass Cloudflare's rate limiting errors and regain access to the target website. Among them, using advanced proxies like Scrapeless is one of the most effective approaches to solving this issue during data scraping. By utilizing advanced proxies, you can distribute the request load among multiple IP addresses, avoiding detection by Cloudflare for excessive requests.
For regular users, disabling browser extensions and using a VPN can also be helpful. Disabling browser extensions reduces potential factors that may interfere with website access, while using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) changes your IP address, making it appear as if you're accessing the website from different locations, thus reducing the risk of being restricted by Cloudflare.
Whichever approach you choose, it's important to use them responsibly, adhere to the website's terms of service, respect the website's privacy policy, and avoid excessive load or disruption to the target website.
At Scrapeless, we only access publicly available data while strictly complying with applicable laws, regulations, and website privacy policies. The content in this blog is for demonstration purposes only and does not involve any illegal or infringing activities. We make no guarantees and disclaim all liability for the use of information from this blog or third-party links. Before engaging in any scraping activities, consult your legal advisor and review the target website's terms of service or obtain the necessary permissions.