Best proxies for web scraping

Most scraping failures blamed on proxies are actually the wrong proxy type, or a request pattern no proxy could rescue. This is how to pick, and what proxies cannot fix.

Short answer

Rotating residential for almost all scraping. ISP only when the target needs you to look like the same visitor each time.

That is the opposite of the advice for account work, and it is the single thing people get backwards.

Why residential wins here

Scraping means many requests. Hundreds an hour, sometimes thousands. From one static IP you will be rate-limited quickly, no matter how clean that IP is — because the block is triggered by volume from a single address, not by the address itself.

A rotating pool spreads those requests across many IPs. Each one looks like an ordinary visitor making an ordinary number of requests. That is the entire mechanism.

Billing follows the same logic. Residential is charged per gigabyte, and scraping is usually light on data per request. Ten thousand product pages is a surprisingly small number of gigabytes.

When ISP is the right call

Logged-in scraping. Anything behind an account — a dashboard, an API tied to a session, a members-only listing. A changing IP mid-session is what breaks these.

Sites that block residential ranges. A few now score consumer ASNs as suspicious, on the reasoning that ordinary people do not make a thousand requests a minute. A static carrier IP with sane pacing can outperform rotation there.

Latency-sensitive work. ISP proxies sit on datacentre links. If you are making sequential requests where each one waits for the last, residential's variable home-connection latency compounds badly.

How much bandwidth do you actually need

Estimate before you buy, because the number is usually smaller than people fear.

• A typical product page, HTML only: 50–200 KB
• The same page with images and scripts: 1–3 MB
• 10,000 HTML-only pages: roughly 1 GB
• 10,000 full pages: 10–30 GB

Block images, fonts and stylesheets in your scraper. Most scrapers only need the HTML, and skipping assets cuts bandwidth by ninety per cent or more. That single change is worth more than any discount you will negotiate.

What proxies cannot fix

Request rate. Two hundred requests a second through a hundred proxies is still two hundred requests a second arriving at one site. Pace yourself.

Browser fingerprint. If you are running a headless browser with default settings, you are identifiable regardless of IP. Rotating proxies behind an identical fingerprint is one visitor pretending to be many, badly.

Behavioural patterns. Perfectly even request timing, no mouse movement, pages fetched in exact sequence — none of that looks human, and no IP disguises it.

Being logged in from twenty countries. If the work involves an account, geographic rotation makes it worse, not better.

Choosing a provider

Pool size matters less than you think. "100 million IPs" is a marketing number. What matters is how many are available in the countries you actually need, and whether they are already burned at your target.

Check the fraud scores yourself before buying at volume. Sample a few IPs through Scamalytics or IPQualityScore.

Match billing to the workload. Per GB for scraping. Per IP only if you have a specific reason to want the same address every time.

Test on your actual target. A provider that works beautifully on one site can be entirely blocked on another. Buy the minimum, test, then scale.

What we sell

Rotating residential from $3.00 per GB, with country, state and city targeting and sticky sessions up to thirty minutes. Data does not expire.

We also sell static ISP proxies, but for general scraping they are usually the wrong tool — buy residential, from us or anyone else.