Peek: monitoring 1000s of customer websites regularly

There are many sites specialized to help you find good accommodation when you travel but not many that help you find fun activities to do while you are there. That’s where Peek is helping people. The website shows you all the interesting activities available in the city you’re visiting and you can also book them right there on the platform. Peek also provides integration for small business customers so they can enjoy the benefits of a booking and calendaring platform on their own website without having to implement a custom solution.

Peek has found its secret sauce to crawl the web at a large scale. And that secret sauce is called Zyte Smart Proxy Manager.

Peek’s mission is to connect the world through experiences with a double-sided marketplace.

Peek: Consumers can find 20,000 easily-bookable experiences either locally at home or when they’re on a trip. The site offers real-time availability, allowing consumers to book experiences right up until the last minute and with confidence with over 800,000 verified reviews and a best price guarantee.

Peek Pro: Provides online booking software to tour operators and a valuable POS (point of sale) system to help tour operators cut down check-in queues and improve in-person customer experience. The Peek Pro app allows tour operators to manage their business on the go from anywhere.

Peek used a major web service provider as their hosting solution to crawl websites but as they leveled up the crawling volume, they were hitting their monthly request limit which made it challenging to monitor websites. They lacked a robust crawling infrastructure which enabled them to crawl at scale.

First Peek looked at monitoring tools like Pingdom but what they found is that these tools can be more expensive and don’t satisfy their requirements for their specific use case.

They also thought about setting up their own proxies. But they soon realized that it would come with a lot of burdens to maintain proxies and keep them working.

Before coming to the conclusion that Zyte Smart Proxy Manager is the best proxy solution for them, they tried several other competitors. What they liked about Smart Proxy Manager is that it was super easy to set up and get started. They also liked the competitive pricing and great service that Zyte provides.

By using Zyte Smart Proxy Manager, Peek gets full control over how they monitor these sites. Peek also realized that having a layer between the spiders and the proxy infrastructure is really powerful. This way, they can instantly alert their customers if an integration breaks, so they can fix it quickly and keep getting bookings - which is essential for Peek’s business model.

For Peek, getting the full HTML of a page while crawling and building their own layer on top of Smart Proxy Manager proved to be the best solution.

While Peek realizes crawling is not the core of their functionality, they still consider it as an essential part of running their business smoothly.

Peek appreciates the flexible pricing Zyte provides, which enables them to scale their requests as they need to with predictable costs.

With the help of Zyte Smart Proxy Manager, Peek is able to solve its large-scale web crawling challenges which is an essential part of their business.