Running Screaming Frog in the Cloud using a Virtarix Server

Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a popular tool among SEO professionals, digital marketers, and web developers. It helps analyse and optimise website performance, identify technical issues, and provide valuable insights that can assist in improving your SEO rankings.

However, running this powerful desktop software on a local machine can cause significant issues. Users often face high resource consumption, performance limitations, and system interference.

Imagine scheduling a comprehensive weekly website health check only to dread the inevitable slowdowns that make multitasking on your local machine nearly impossible. Fortunately, there’s an easy-to-implement solution: the Virtual Private Server (VPS).

Running Screaming Frog on a VPS ensures continuous operation without straining your local computer or network resources. It offers enhanced performance, solves bandwidth and scalability issues, and provides reliable data storage and management. Plus, you can access it remotely, making it easier to manage your SEO projects anytime, anywhere.

Why run Screaming Frog on a VPS?

Running Screaming Frog on a VPS offers several compelling advantages. A VPS provides dedicated and scalable resources, ensuring smooth operation without overloading your local machine. This results in superior performance, faster crawl times and the potential to perform MASSIVE crawls due to enhanced hardware capabilities.

Additionally, using a VPS leverages independent network bandwidth, preventing local internet slowdowns. The redundancy and uptime provided by a VPS far outmatch what you can achieve when running locally, making it ideal for long or scheduled crawls that require continuous operation.

The flexibility to adjust resources based on your crawl size and frequency offers scalable options tailored to your specific needs. A VPS also excels in data storage and management, handling large datasets more effectively and providing improved backup options. By running Screaming Frog on a VPS, you minimise interference with your local system, keeping your machine free for other tasks. This setup not only enhances efficiency but also optimises your overall workflow.

Big 3 cloud providers vs. VPS: which is better for Screaming Frog?

Considering its resource-intensive processing, many users seek alternatives to running Screaming Frog on local machines. Two popular options are deploying it with major public Cloud providers or on a VPS. Each has its pros and cons, so let’s explore which might be the better choice.

Using major cloud providers

Major cloud providers offer many compute, storage, network, and management services, but cost and behavior depend on the selected architecture. For the crawl workload, model compute time, persistent storage, snapshots, transfer, public addresses, monitoring, support, discounts, and idle-resource policy. Configure quotas, billing alerts, shutdown controls, authentication, and recovery before running unattended jobs.

On a VPS

A VPS provides a remote virtual machine under a plan-specific resource and network policy. Benchmark the crawl, confirm licensing, and size CPU, memory, storage, transfer, address, backup, and monitoring from measured runs. Include the plan, support, operations time, and resize path in the cost model.

An unmanaged VPS also makes the customer responsible for operating-system and application hardening, patching, monitoring, backup validation, recovery, and incidents. Confirm provider support boundaries and allowed software before treating it as the preferred option.

Deployment decision matrix

Decision factor	Virtarix or another VPS plan	Major cloud services
Compute and storage	Confirm plan allocation, CPU policy, storage behavior, transfer, and resize path	Select and benchmark the exact instance, storage, transfer, and service configuration
Licensing	Confirm Screaming Frog licensing and any concurrent-use restrictions	Apply the same licensing review to every image and automated job
Security	Customer owns operating-system and application hardening; confirm provider network controls	Follow the selected services’ shared-responsibility model and identity controls
Backup and recovery	Confirm current snapshot/backup scope, retention, cost, and restore steps	Design storage, snapshots, retention, access, and restore validation explicitly
Availability	Read the applicable SLA and design monitoring, retry, recovery, and acceptable downtime	Read each service SLA and design for the failure modes the architecture introduces
Cost	Model plan, transfer, backup, support, operations, and resize work	Model compute, storage, requests, transfer, monitoring, support, discounts, and idle resources
Evaluation	Run the same crawl dataset and record duration, errors, resource use, recovery, and total cost	Use the same dataset, period, region, license, and acceptance criteria

Evaluation scenario: a shared crawling environment

A team that wants remote crawling should test collaboration rather than publish an unverified customer outcome. Run the same crawl on the local baseline and each candidate deployment. Record crawl duration, queueing, data-sharing workflow, license compliance, resource use, failures, backup restore, access control, and operator time before choosing the host.