2 posts tagged with "proxy benchmarks"

A residential proxy provider may advertise 150 million IPs, a 98% success rate and its own "premium" network.

None of those claims tells you whether it will work for your scraper.

Behind the marketing, providers frequently combine directly acquired IPs with third-party supply. The same addresses appear across multiple networks. An IP that works on one website can be completely unusable on another.

What separates providers may not be the pool itself, but the filtering, routing and session-management layer sitting between that raw supply and your scraper.

As NodeMaven's founder Stan Sadokov put it during our recent Reddit AMA:

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Once that clicks, most of the marketing in this industry stops working on you.

Stan spent years working on browser fingerprinting and anti-detect technology at Multilogin before founding NodeMaven. During that time, he repeatedly saw apparently correct browser configurations fail because of problems at the proxy layer.

In our fifth r/WebScrapingInsider AMA, we asked Stan how residential proxy networks really work, what separates high-quality providers from weak ones and how developers should evaluate them.

Here are the nine biggest insights from the discussion.

Ask ten scraping teams what the best proxy provider is, and you'll get ten confident answers.

They can't all be right. It turns out none of them are.

"What's the best proxy provider?" is the most common question in web scraping. It's also the wrong one.

There is no universal winner. The best provider depends on which sites you scrape and how many pages you pull, and the moment either of those changes, the answer changes with it.

We found that out by benchmarking the major Proxy APIs and residential providers against live performance data, then pricing every plan at 10k, 100k and 1M pages a month. We expected the usual pattern: pay more, get more. The data said something else.

The clearest finding in the whole dataset is that price and performance barely relate. Paying more does not reliably buy you a faster or more reliable scrape. Sometimes it does. Most of the time it doesn't. And you can't tell in advance which situation you're in.

There is no best proxy provider. There is only the best provider for your sites, at your volume, and the only way to find it is to measure it.

The rest of this piece is the evidence, in three steps. Price doesn't predict performance. The best provider changes with the site you're scraping. And it changes again with how much you're scraping. By the end, the case for testing your own workload makes itself.