How To Choose A Proxy Provider: A Checklist That Survives Contact

Ignore the pool size headline

Every provider quotes tens of millions of IPs. Nobody audits it, the number counts addresses seen at any point over months, and you will never touch most of them. What matters is how many usable, non-repeating IPs you get in your target country during your working hours. Test it: pull 1,000 IPs in one country and count uniques.

The checklist

Targeting granularity. Country everywhere, city and ASN where you need them, and no premium surcharge for basics.

Session control. Can you hold an IP for a defined period, and release it on demand? Automation lives on this.

Protocol support. HTTP, HTTPS and SOCKS5. Missing SOCKS5 breaks a lot of tooling.

Authentication. Both username/password and IP whitelisting, so the same credentials work from a laptop and from a server fleet.

Usage visibility. Live bandwidth reporting, per-sub-user if you run a team. Monthly-only reporting is how surprise bills happen.

Sub-users and access control. Separate credentials per project, with their own limits.

Billing terms. Does unused data expire? Is there a refund window? What are the volume tiers, in writing?

Support that is human. Ask a technical pre-sales question and time the reply. That response is the one you will get at 2am during an incident.

Sourcing ethics. Ask how residential IPs are obtained and whether the people providing them consented and are compensated. A provider that dodges this question is a legal risk you inherit.

How to test in an afternoon

Take the smallest paid plan on your shortlist. Run the same 500-request job against your real targets on each. Record success rate, median latency, unique IP count and cost per successful request. Then hold one sticky session for an hour and see whether it survives.

Four numbers, one afternoon, and you will know more than any comparison table can tell you.

The intangible that matters at scale

Once you are spending seriously, the thing that saves you time is having a person to talk to — someone who knows your setup, can raise a limit without a ticket queue and will tell you honestly when a target is not worth chasing. Providers who give you a named contact above a spend threshold are worth a slightly higher rate.