Marcus Chen
Product & Network Architect
Marcus Chen is a Product & Network Architect at Nstdata with deep expertise in proxy infrastructure, network engineering, and web data acquisition. He specializes in designing scalable residential, ISP, mobile, and datacenter proxy solutions that enable reliable access to global web resources. His articles focus on proxy technologies, network optimization, cybersecurity, and large-scale scraping architecture.
All Articles
Nstdata vs Firecrawl: A Cheaper, Pay-as-you-go Alternative (2026)
Nstdata Crawl offers true pay-as-you-go usage for bounded page and site crawling, while Firecrawl centers paid use on recurring credits. Compare failure billing, proxy costs, outputs, and workload fit.
Best Chunking Strategies for RAG in 2026: A Practical Selection Guide
RAG chunking should be chosen by corpus structure and query behavior, not a copied token size. This guide ranks five strategies and explains how to prove the choice with retrieval and answer tests.
ChatGPT Bans Explained: The Causes, and How to Appeals 2026
βBannedβ can describe an account action, a security alert, a local network block, or an outage. This guide classifies the failure before showing the appropriate recovery path.
Anonymous Browsing Explained: Tools, Limits, and Setup
Anonymous browsing requires separating a session from your usual IP, accounts, cookies, and browser characteristics. This guide compares the tools by observer and provides a cautious Tor Browser workflow.
BIGmama Proxy Setup for Windows and macOS: Practical Guide
This guide separates the dependable Firefox SOCKS5 workflow from the different system-level options on Windows and macOS. It also provides an acceptance test for IP, DNS, scope, session behavior, and authentication.
Claude Web Fetch vs Firecrawl: Which Retrieval Layer Fits?
Claude web fetch is model-native retrieval for known URLs, while Firecrawl is an independent web-context layer. The article includes both workflows and a bonus Nstdata Crawl retrieval tutorial.
ScrapingBee Review and Alternatives in 2026: When Nstdata Fits
ScrapingBee remains a capable page API, but some workloads need a different cost, output, task, or multi-page boundary. This guide reviews ScrapingBee first, then details Nstdata Crawl and a provider-neutral migration process.
6 Best Investment Research APIs for Complete Market Context in 2026
Investment research requires several data authorities rather than one universal API. This guide combines regulated filings and licensed market feeds with Nstdata Crawl for approved company, IR, newsroom, and policy pages.
Web Scraping for Beginners: How Collection Actually Works
Web scraping becomes understandable when it is reduced to choosing, fetching, parsing, extracting, and validating. This beginner guide focuses on one permitted page and one explicit data contract before tools or scale.
