Proxies

Look I'm at the airport typing this fast but people need to hear it. Been testing BrightData vs Smartproxy vs Oxylabs for a high volume project, the kind where you need thousands of unique sessions daily. The marketing says they're all elite. The data says they all have the same fatal flaw if you're not careful. The session consistency is a joke. You get a clean IP for one request, the next request two seconds later is from an IP flagged by every major platform already. It's burning through your budget on garbage IPs and you won't know until your scrapers get hard banned. My logs show all three providers have this issue in their standard rotating residential pools. TL;DR don't just buy based on brand name. You have to immediately test session stickiness and IP reputation the second you get your credentials. Right now none of them are worth the premium price for my use case. The data tells a different story.

tbh need to scrape listings from like 20 different city sites (think craigslist style). each site blocks non-local ips. my current residential pool gets me a conv rate of maybe 15% before bans kick in, which is sus. so im looking at integrating with puppeteer-stealth (or maybe undetected-chrome-driver) but need proxy API that can give me clean IPs for specific zip codes (or at least accurate city-level geo). anyone got hard data on this? like success rates and cost per successful session? tired of vague answers.

Been testing free proxies all morning, my head hurts. The speeds are a joke, like 0.1 MBps tops, and the latency is so bad I think my ISP hates me. No matter what site or tool I try, they either drop connections or just flat out don't work. Tried multiple providers, same story. It's like chasing ghosts. How the hell do people still think these are worth a shot? Spoiler: they're not. Never rely on free crap for serious scraping or ad stuff, just gets you banned or wasting hours. Native ads are the only way to stay legit and avoid this junk. Makes me wanna scream. So confused, but I know I need to stop wasting time with these freebies, they're just a bandaid for a bullet wound.

jump right in. proxy APIs and proxy lists, the eternal debate. honestly, after messing with both, i can say they each have their moments of glory and disappointment. i ran a bunch of speed tests on a couple of popular providers - let's call them provider a and provider b for the sake of not calling anyone out. provider a's API was like a sports car out of the box - fast, responsive, no drama. but you gotta keep renewing tokens, dealing with rate limits, all that jazz. meanwhile provider b's static list? slower, but reliable, no fuss, just fetch and go. in terms of raw speed, the API hovered around 20-30 ms, while the static lists clocked in at about 50-70 ms. who wins? depends. if you need real-time stuff, API is king. if you're just scraping or testing waters, lists might save you some headaches. the question is, do you value speed over stability or the other way around? lm on the fence but hard agree, pick what fits your workflow and don't expect a miracle either way. it's still proxy game - speed, reliability and sometimes a little bit of luck

So I was drowning in cash and bandwidth trying to keep my scrapers under the radar, right? Spent the last week messing around with a bunch of setups, and I finally got a decent rotation system going using Python and this new tool I found. The results are kinda nuts. Instead of burning thru 50 proxies a day, I managed to stabilize it at about 15, and the success rate jumped from 40 percent to over 75 percent on my scraping tasks. And get this - I set it up to switch IPs every 3 minutes, and it stuck pretty well w/o blowing my cap or raising flags. The best part? The system auto-detects proxy health, and if one gets slow or blacklisted, it skips it. Not perfect, but I've seen enough to think this might be my new bread and butter. Costs are way down too, since I'm cycling through cheaper residentials instead of the big pools. Still in testing phase, but honestly, I'm feeling bullish. Just had to share because I was close to throwing in the towel after some of those disaster setups.

So I finally got tired of guessing if my proxies are actually fast enough or just a glorified brick wall. Made a simple test setup: run a few hundred requests, measure the time, then compare. Surprised? Nope, just confirmed what I already suspected - most providers oversell their speed claims like used car salesmen. Found a decent deal on a tier 1 residential provider, 20% off for first month if you use code SPEEDY20. Data shows the real deal is in the low 200ms range, not the 50ms fantasy they push. Moral? Don't trust flashy claims, run your own numbers. My pixel says otherwise, but your mileage may vary

okay, so i'm hitting a wall with my usual setup for scraping serps. all my tools are getting blocked within minutes even with residential rotations, it's honestly pathetic. the usual suspects claim their ips are clean but google just laughs. i stumbled on this smaller proxy provider last week that's offering dedicated isp proxies, not residential, not datacenter, they're selling actual consumer broadband line ips. i ran a test for seven days straight scraping the same set of local keywords, zero captchas, zero hard blocks. the data looks clean. here's my question though - has anyone else actually validated something like this long-term? they sent me a promo code for 40% off the first month which feels too good. i'm worried it's just a fresh pool that hasn't been burned yet and in a month it'll be trash. show me your own logs if you've tried something similar, lmao. i need to see the numbers before i move all my scrapers over.

Yo guys, I've been messing with rotating proxies for a project and I am super frustrated. I'm trying to set up a proxy rotation in, but it keeps tripping or getting blocked. Anyone got a proven method or specific provider that actually works without me spending a fortune? I need reliable residential proxies that rotate fast and don't get detected easily. Tried some cheap ones but they're dead or slow. If anyone has a setup that actually works with minimal bans, hit me up quick. I'm running out of patience here.

man, remember when proxies were just proxies? now its all shiny dashboards and subscription plans. back in the day, just pick a few decent residentials and call it a day. now you gotta choose between brightdata, smartproxy, oxylabs and its like picking your favorite kid. tried all three for scraping and anti-detection stuff. brightdata was king for a while but the price was a punch in the gut. smartproxy had nice speed but hit detection walls quick. oxylabs? premium but man the costs. miss the old days when a good IP was a good IP and you didn't need a degree in cloud architecture to figure out which one worked. overthinking it, but sometimes I just wanna grab a bucket of residentials and go old school.

Okay so the standard wisdom you see in every thread is that you must have rotating residential proxies if you're doing any kind of ad verification work like checking competitor LPs or seeing what creatives are live and I'm sitting here looking at six months of data from a scraped setup that just doesn't support that blanket statement. I started with a big pool of rotating residential IPs for monitoring, the whole nine yards, and sure they're undetectable but the cost is brutal and my success rate for loading full LP assets consistently was actually lower than when I tested a smaller pool of static, high-quality datacenter IPs from a less-known provider. I think the problem with ad verification isn't detection it's consistency you need an IP that holds the connection long enough to render JavaScript and load all the assets especially if you're trying to verify popunders or interstitial ads that have multiple redirects and everyone screams about using residentials because they look like real users but if your residential proxy rotates every request or even mid-session which a lot of the cheaper backconnect pools do then your script might get a fresh IP halfway through loading the page and that breaks everything leading to false negatives where you think an LP isn't live but it's just your proxy setup failing. The numbers I'm seeing tell me to prioritize session stability over pure residential anonymity for most basic geo-checks what are you guys actually measuring? Are you tracking your actual asset-load success rate as a percentage or just assuming because you're using residentials that it's working? Track it or lack it right, but we need to talk about what metrics matter here because I've watched sessions where a datacenter IP from a clean subnet loads everything in two seconds flat while a rotating residential times out on the third hop.

Alright so I see people posting these proxy speed test results all the time and honestly they're mostly useless. Everyone just runs a quick ping or a basic curl command and calls it a day. The numbers look good but then you actually try to scrape something and your script times out. It's because they're not testing under real load. I went back and integrated my testing directly into Scrapebox, since that's what I use for the heavy lifting anyway. The key is to test with actual concurrent requests, not just one at a time. I set up a custom harvest list of 500 URLs on a test server, then ran it through different proxy providers with Scrapebox's multi-threading cranked up to 50 threads. You get the real metrics - average time per successful request, total failures from timeouts, not just raw bandwidth speed. The data tells a totally different story than those generic ping tests. One provider had great ping but failed on 40% of requests under concurrency because their nodes were overloaded. Another was slower per request but rock solid with zero failures, which is way more valuable for actual work. My advice is stop using standalone tools for this and bake your test into whatever you're actually going to use the proxies for.

right, need proxies that can actually verify ads across different geos without getting flagged immediately. tried a few residential providers last month and the detection rates were laughable - like 60% blocked within 24 hours. my current setup uses rotating residential with custom headers but even that's getting expensive fast. specifically looking at mobile proxies now since they should mimic real user behavior better for ad platforms, but the pricing i'm seeing is insane. anyone running actual ad verification campaigns right now? what's your monthly spend per geo and what failure rate are you tolerating? bonus points if you've compared static residential vs mobile for this specific use case.

Ok, so I gotta ask cuz I'm honestly stuck on this one. Been testing different proxy providers trying to get that sweet spot for anti-fingerprinting stuff and it's a mess. Tried a handful of residentials, datacenters, and mobile proxies, but the results are all over the place. Like, some providers claim they're ultra-anonymous but then I get fingered within a couple of minutes. Others claim they're anti-detect but my scripts still get flagged. It's frustrating because I keep spending money on these so-called 'anti-fingerprinting' proxies and they just don't deliver. Want to share what I've seen so far, maybe someone has insights because I'm honestly at my wit's end here. So, for example, I tested Provider A's residential proxies. They tout anti-fingerprinting tech, but my fingerprint tests show a 42% detection rate after just 10 mins of scraping a site that's got decent bot protection. Provider B's residentials? Same tech, but the detection jumps to 78%. On the mobile front, Provider C's proxies seemed better but still gave me a 29% detection rate after 15 mins. Datacenter proxies are even worse they're usually the first to get flagged, especially if you're not rotating fast enough or if the IP pools are stale. The one thing I did notice is that some providers with decent pool freshness and more aggressive rotation strategies perform marginally better, but it's not enough. Here's the kicker: I even tried mixing providers on the same request, using different proxies from different pools, thinking maybe a combo would throw off fingerprinting. Nope. Detection rates just stay high, around 50%+ for most setups. It's like no matter what, they got us pegged somehow. And the worst part? I've been running my tests with strict timing and user-agent randomization, but nothing seems to hold. I'm starting to think that maybe some providers are just playing it safe or using older, more detectable IPs behind the scenes. So yeah, I need some real-world examples or suggestions. Anyone cracked the code on legit anti-fingerprinting proxies that actually work for scraping or automation without getting caught? Or are we all just chasing ghosts here? This is turning into a full-blown headache, and I'm not trying to blow cash on false promises anymore. Hit me up if u got data, proof, or just your horror stories. Tbh, I might just go back to VPNs if I keep hitting dead ends.

hey guys been messing with proxies for a bit and lately i'm thinking of building my own pool instead of using providers. but tbh i'm kinda lost. like i get the basics - get residentials, datacenter, mobile ones and rotate them right? but checking all those speed tests and reviews online just confuses me. some say residentials are slow as hell but safe, others say datacenter is faster but risky. and mobile proxies? idk if they're even worth it or if you can find decent ones for a diy setup

so, just discovered how sneaky sites get you flagged, and man it's wild. they check your headers, IP patterns, request behavior, even timing gaps and ua strings. like, they have scripts running in the background checking if your proxy headers match real browsers. cheaper proxies? forget it, they get caught fast. high quality residential or mobile proxies? way better at slipping past these checks but at a price. see the thing is, you gotta weigh price vs quality. low cost datacenter proxies? they might save you a buck but get flagged quicker than a noob. mobile proxies? costly but they blend in better, especially for anti-detection. also, some providers just slap a detection layer on their proxies, so always read reviews., you wanna buy the least detectable, most legit proxies you can afford, cause getting banned for bad proxies is just a waste of time. anyone got tested sites that really catch proxies? or better ways to stay hidden?

ok so follow up from my old thread - i tried that python script for rotating residentials. everyone here says rotating is better than static for scraping but honestly after testing, im not fully convinced. like the bans are just slower not gone. used a popular provider, script logs in fresh session each time thru a new ip, random delays, real browser headers via requests lib. still got soft-blocked after like 2k requests on a basic ecom site. maybe its just that site but i feel like the whole 'rotate = safe' thing is overhyped. if the site checks fingerprint or behavior patterns ur ip pool wont matter. i can share the code snippet later but basically it pulls ips from an api endpoint and cycles them via requests.Session adapter. still hits blocks. i wanna hear if anyone else runs into this? maybe my cr sucks cuz im missing some other signal they track. or do u think datacenter proxies with better anti-detect setup would actually outperform cheap rotating resis? been seeing some wild debates lately.

Been trying to sort out proxies for this stupid campaign. Thought SOCKS5 was supposed to be the all-rounder, faster, more flexible, better for scraping. But guess what? HTTP proxies keep breaking on me, even with all the configs. SOCKS5 is flaky at best. Tried different providers, all same story. Some say SOCKS5 is for quick stuff, but it seems like half the time they drop connection or get blocked faster. Meanwhile HTTP proxies, well they seem more reliable but slower. Lost a bunch of money testing both. Now I'm stuck. Anyone got real experience with these? When to actually use which? Seems like a simple choice but it's turning into a nightmare. This whole proxy thing is a PITA. I just want it to work, not fight it every day.

alright posting an update to the thing I said about testing BrightData for local content scrapes specifically for that city-level offer research the results are kinda all over the place and im getting impatient trying to figure out if its a price problem or a proxy quality problem So the data from my five day test on a Tier 2 geo shows BrightData residential costs me like $15 per GB but their geo targeting is rock solid like 98% of IPs came from my target city problem is the speed is wildly inconsistent EPC for the scraped data drops when the proxy response time is over 2 seconds and I get those spikes about 30% of the time Tried a cheaper datacenter provider as a control group sure the price was like 1/10th but the geo targeting was a joke half the IPs were flagged as datacenters by the sites I was hitting so the localized content was basically useless Now im sitting here with a cost sheet that says the expensive proxies make my per-piece data cost viable but the cheaper ones are basically worthless for localization does anyone have a middle-ground provider they actually verified for tight geo pins without the residential price tag I dont need perfection I just need a CR boost on the data feed show me the numbers you got

Just lost a chunk on a campaign. Sitting here trying to figure out what I paid per GB. Prices everywhere seem all over the place. Some providers say 10 bucks a GB, others 5, some even more. How the hell do you even compare? Integration with RedTrack or Voluum makes it worse. You set your campaign, see CR drop like a stone, then realize your proxy costs ate all your ROI. Scraping proxies are cheap but they get caught faster. Residential ones supposed to be stealth but man, the prices are crazy. I swear I saw a provider at 20 bucks a GB. Who the hell is paying that? Tried to do a breakdown, including setup, maintenance, and just pure data costs. It's like trying to count grains of sand. Anyone got a legit, real-world breakdown? Or am I just being suckered? Just wanna understand what I'm really paying for and why it's so damn expensive to stay unnoticed.

Been messing with geo-targeted residential proxies for local content. No matter what I do, I get global IPs or wrong regions. Tried every provider out there. Some say just set the country code and go. No luck. Sites still detect and block. Anyone cracked the code? Or is this just another myth?