Proxies for web scraping

Start with the target, not with a vendor. Open pages, public docs, and your own origin will accept datacenter proxies. Those IPs are fast and they keep crawl cost down. Protected retailers, search, and anything with a bot score will label the same ranges as hosting and cut them off.

Residential traffic pays off when the site already rejects datacenter ASNs and you still have a legitimate reason to collect the page. A household IP is slower and billed by volume, so it is the expensive lane. Use it for the URLs that need it. Keep datacenter IPs for the rest of the job. Read the residential vs datacenter notes if you are choosing origin first.

Match rotation to the shape of the request. Rotating IPs spread a large URL list across many addresses. Sticky IPs keep a cookie, a CSRF token, or a multi-step flow on one address for a few minutes. Mixing those modes without a plan is how sessions break. See sticky vs rotating proxies for the session mechanics.

Respect the rules that already apply to the crawl. Honor robots.txt when you have agreed to it. Cap concurrency so you do not knock over a small origin. Cache what you already fetched. A proxy does not make an abusive crawler acceptable. It only changes which IP the server logs.

What to check before you buy

• Origin of the IP (datacenter, residential, or mobile) against a real sample of target URLs
• Session mode (rotating or sticky) and the advertised hold time
• Country targeting that matches the page you need, not a nearby market
• Billing unit (per GB, per port, or per IP) against a measured test crawl
• Protocol (HTTP or SOCKS5) that your scraper actually speaks
• Auth method, subnet diversity, and a documented source story for residential pools
• A live check in the proxy checker before you scale the order