PHP cURL not working when send POST request to fetch data

Question

I am recently working on a project on which I need to scrape some data from an external website. It is working on Localhost but stopped working on the live host. I explored on google as well on StackOverflow where people suggested that open PHP curl extension etc but everything already opened because I am doing a lot more scraping on that hosting which is working as cake.

Code is

$url = "https://pakesimdata.com/sim/search-result.php";
$ch = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, TRUE);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 5);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 40);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, "cookie.txt");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "cnnum=3005210911");
echo $html = curl_exec($ch);

When I echo the result with URL https://pakesimdata.com/sim/search.php or https://pakesimdata.com/ I got the result but it is not working when I do the POST request to acquire the result on URL https://pakesimdata.com/sim/search-result.php. It shows me nothing. I also do the error handling but got no luck, gave no error which put me a great headache. I can not grab what's going on and on which section I need to work to get the results.

question from:https://stackoverflow.com/questions/65867858/php-curl-not-working-when-send-post-request-to-fetch-data

Answer 1

It is working on Localhost but stopped working on the live host.

This would suggest two possibilites 1.) Your host does not like outgoing http connections which you rules out already 2.) The remote host does not like your scarping

ad 2.) Can it be they have blocked your IP address or some other mechanism is protecting the page from beeing used by your script as usually operators of services like this do not like to be scraped by bots.

LOCALHOST will probably appear as your own private IP address with probably a dynamic always changing IP address - like an ordinary user.

Your real server will have a fixed IP adress and probably the external website analzes the traffic and blocks ip adresses for abuse if a lot of requests are coming from the same IP.