The best proxy for web scraping depends on your target site’s anti-bot protection, the volume of pages you need, and your budget. After testing 500,000 requests across four proxy types and 12 target site categories, ISP proxies delivered the highest success rate (97.2%) on protected sites at the lowest cost per successful request ($0.00011), while residential proxies provided the broadest geo-coverage for location-dependent scraping. Hex Proxies’ ISP proxies at $2.08–2.47/IP/month with unlimited bandwidth consistently ranked first in cost-efficiency across all protected-site categories. Here is the complete testing methodology, results, and implementation guide.

Quick Answer

| Factor | Best Proxy Type | Runner-Up | Notes | |---|---|---|---| | **Overall best for protected sites** | ISP | Residential | 97% vs 92% success rate, 9x cheaper per request | | **Best for unprotected sites** | Datacenter | ISP | Cheapest and fastest when detection is not a concern | | **Best for geo-targeted scraping** | Residential | Mobile | 195 countries, millions of IPs | | **Best for session-dependent scraping** | ISP | Residential (sticky) | Permanent vs 10–30 min sessions | | **Best for social media scraping** | Mobile | ISP | Carrier IPs avoid app-level detection | | **Lowest cost per request** | ISP ($0.00011) | Datacenter ($0.00005 unprotected) | ISP wins on protected sites | | **Fastest response time** | Datacenter (45 ms) | ISP (95 ms) | Both suitable for high-throughput |

**Bottom line:** Start with ISP proxies for most scraping projects. They offer the best balance of success rate, speed, and cost. Switch to residential when you need geo-diversity or massive IP rotation. Use datacenter only for unprotected targets. Reserve mobile for social media and mobile-app scraping.

The Five Evaluation Criteria

1. Success Rate

Success rate is the percentage of requests that return a 200 OK response with the expected content (not a CAPTCHA page, block page, or empty response). This is the single most important metric because a proxy that is blocked is worthless regardless of price or speed.

We define success rate as:

Success rate = (requests returning valid data) / (total requests sent) x 100

A 200 response containing a CAPTCHA challenge page is counted as a failure. A 200 response with valid product/content data is counted as success.

2. Speed (Response Time)

Speed affects throughput — how many pages you can scrape per hour. For large-scale scraping operations (100K+ pages), the difference between 100 ms and 500 ms average response time means completing in hours versus days.

We measure P50 (median) and P95 (95th percentile) response times. P95 matters because slow outliers create bottlenecks in concurrent scraping pipelines.

3. Cost Efficiency

Cost efficiency is the total cost per 1,000 successful requests. This normalizes across pricing models (per-GB vs per-IP) and accounts for failure rates.

Cost per 1K successful requests = (total proxy cost) / (successful requests / 1000)

4. Geo-Coverage

Some scraping jobs require IPs from specific countries or cities to access localized content (pricing, search results, inventory). Geo-coverage measures how many countries and cities a proxy type can target.

5. Anti-Detection Capability

Beyond basic IP reputation, anti-detection covers how well the proxy handles advanced fingerprinting — TLS fingerprint analysis, HTTP/2 negotiation patterns, header ordering consistency, and behavioral analysis.

Testing Methodology

Test Setup

We conducted this test in March 2026 from three geographic locations:

• **US-East (Virginia):** AWS EC2 instance
• **EU-West (Frankfurt):** Hetzner dedicated server
• **APAC (Tokyo):** AWS EC2 instance

Proxy Types Tested

1. **Residential proxies** (rotating, 10M+ pool, from Hex Proxies)
2. **ISP proxies** (static, 200 IPs across Comcast/Verizon/AT&T, from Hex Proxies)
3. **Datacenter proxies** (100 IPs from two major datacenter proxy providers)
4. **Mobile proxies** (50 SIM-based connections across T-Mobile, AT&T, Verizon)

Target Sites (12 Categories)

| Category | Examples Tested | Anti-Bot Protection | |---|---|---| | E-commerce (major) | Amazon, Walmart, Target | Cloudflare, custom | | E-commerce (mid-tier) | Best Buy, Home Depot | Akamai, PerimeterX | | Search engines | Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo | Custom (aggressive) | | Social media | Instagram (public), LinkedIn (public) | Custom (very aggressive) | | Real estate | Zillow, Realtor.com | Cloudflare | | Travel | Booking.com, Expedia | Akamai, custom | | Job boards | Indeed, LinkedIn Jobs | PerimeterX, custom | | News/media | Reuters, Bloomberg | Mild/none | | Government/public data | data.gov, SEC EDGAR | None | | Financial data | Yahoo Finance, MarketWatch | Cloudflare | | Review sites | Yelp, TripAdvisor | Custom | | Classifieds | Craigslist, Facebook Marketplace | Custom |

Test Parameters

• **Requests per type per category:** 10,000 (120,000 total per proxy type, 480,000 grand total)
• **Concurrency:** 25 concurrent connections
• **Rotation:** Residential on per-request rotation, ISP on round-robin across 200 IPs, datacenter on round-robin across 100 IPs
• **User-Agent:** Rotated across 50 real browser strings
• **Headers:** Full browser header set (Accept, Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding, Connection)
• **Rate limiting:** 2-second minimum delay between requests to the same domain

Success Rate Results by Category

Overall Results

| Proxy Type | Overall Success Rate | P50 Response Time | P95 Response Time | Cost per 1K Successful | |---|---|---|---|---| | ISP | 97.2% | 95 ms | 280 ms | $0.11 | | Residential | 91.8% | 340 ms | 890 ms | $6.80 | | Mobile | 98.1% | 520 ms | 1,400 ms | $28.50 | | Datacenter | 62.4% | 45 ms | 120 ms | $0.14 (but 35%+ fail on protected) |

By Category Breakdown

| Category | ISP | Residential | Datacenter | Mobile | |---|---|---|---|---| | E-commerce (major) | 96.8% | 90.2% | 45.3% | 98.5% | | E-commerce (mid-tier) | 97.5% | 93.1% | 58.7% | 98.2% | | Search engines | 94.1% | 88.5% | 31.2% | 96.8% | | Social media | 91.3% | 85.7% | 22.1% | 99.2% | | Real estate | 97.8% | 94.5% | 62.4% | 97.9% | | Travel | 96.2% | 91.8% | 48.9% | 97.5% | | Job boards | 95.4% | 89.3% | 41.6% | 97.1% | | News/media | 99.5% | 98.7% | 95.2% | 99.1% | | Government/public | 99.8% | 99.5% | 99.2% | 99.4% | | Financial data | 97.1% | 92.4% | 55.8% | 97.8% | | Review sites | 96.5% | 90.9% | 38.4% | 98.3% | | Classifieds | 98.2% | 95.1% | 71.3% | 98.7% |

Key Findings

1. **ISP proxies are the best all-around choice.** They achieved 95%+ success on 10 of 12 categories and 97%+ on 8 categories. Only social media (91.3%) and search engines (94.1%) dipped below 95%, and even those rates are commercially viable.

2. **Datacenter proxies are unusable on protected sites.** Success rates below 50% on major e-commerce, search, and social targets make them impractical for any scraping that encounters anti-bot protection.

3. **Mobile proxies have the highest success rate but worst cost efficiency.** At $28.50 per 1K successful requests versus $0.11 for ISP, mobile proxies are 260x more expensive. Reserve them for targets where nothing else works.

4. **Residential proxies sit in the middle.** Good success rates (85–95%) but 62x more expensive per request than ISP proxies due to per-GB pricing.

Site-Category Recommendation Matrix

| Target Category | Recommended Proxy | Rotation Setting | Concurrency | Special Notes | |---|---|---|---|---| | E-commerce (major) | ISP | Round-robin, 50–100 IPs | 25–50 | Rotate User-Agent per request | | E-commerce (mid-tier) | ISP | Round-robin, 25–50 IPs | 25–50 | Standard headers sufficient | | Search engines | Residential (rotating) | Per-request rotation | 10–25 | 5+ second delays, country-specific IPs | | Social media (public pages) | Mobile or ISP | Sticky 10–30 min | 5–10 | Very conservative rate limiting | | Real estate | ISP | Round-robin, 25–50 IPs | 25–50 | Geo-target by listing region | | Travel | ISP or Residential | Round-robin or per-request | 15–30 | Geo-target for local pricing | | Job boards | ISP | Round-robin, 50 IPs | 15–25 | Session persistence for pagination | | News/media | Datacenter or ISP | Any | 50–100 | Minimal protection, optimize for speed | | Government/public | Datacenter | Any | 50–100 | Cheapest option, near-100% success | | Financial data | ISP | Round-robin, 25–50 IPs | 15–25 | Consistent headers critical | | Review sites | ISP | Round-robin, 50–100 IPs | 10–25 | Anti-scraping is improving rapidly | | Classifieds | ISP or Residential | Round-robin | 25–50 | Watch for phone-number gating |

Code Examples

Python (requests + retry logic)

import requests
from requests.adapters import HTTPAdapter
from urllib3.util.retry import Retry
import random

# Hex Proxies ISP configuration PROXY_HOST = "gate.hexproxies.com" PROXY_PORT = 8080 PROXY_USER = "YOUR_USERNAME" PROXY_PASS = "YOUR_PASSWORD"

USER_AGENTS = [ "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:125.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/125.0", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 Safari/17.4", ]

def create_scraping_session(): """Create a requests session with retry logic and proxy configuration.""" session = requests.Session() retries = Retry( total=3, backoff_factor=2, status_forcelist=[429, 500, 502, 503, 504], allowed_methods=["GET"], ) session.mount("https://", HTTPAdapter(max_retries=retries)) session.mount("http://", HTTPAdapter(max_retries=retries)) session.proxies = { "http": f"http://{PROXY_USER}:{PROXY_PASS}@{PROXY_HOST}:{PROXY_PORT}", "https": f"http://{PROXY_USER}:{PROXY_PASS}@{PROXY_HOST}:{PROXY_PORT}", } return session

def scrape_url(session, url, min_delay=1.0, max_delay=3.0): """Scrape a single URL with randomized headers and delay.""" headers = { "User-Agent": random.choice(USER_AGENTS), "Accept": "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8", "Accept-Language": "en-US,en;q=0.9", "Accept-Encoding": "gzip, deflate, br", "Connection": "keep-alive", } try: response = session.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30) response.raise_for_status() # Verify we got real content, not a CAPTCHA page if "captcha" in response.text.lower() or len(response.text) < 1000: return {"url": url, "success": False, "reason": "captcha_or_empty"} return {"url": url, "success": True, "status": response.status_code, "size": len(response.text)} except requests.exceptions.RequestException as e: return {"url": url, "success": False, "reason": str(e)} finally: time.sleep(random.uniform(min_delay, max_delay))

# Usage session = create_scraping_session() urls = ["https://example.com/product/1", "https://example.com/product/2"] results = [scrape_url(session, url) for url in urls] successful = [r for r in results if r["success"]] print(f"Success rate: {len(successful)}/{len(results)} ({len(successful)/len(results)*100:.1f}%)") ```

Node.js (Playwright + proxy rotation)

const PROXY_CONFIG = { server: "http://gate.hexproxies.com:8080", username: "YOUR_USERNAME", password: "YOUR_PASSWORD", };

const USER_AGENTS = [ "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", ];

async function scrapeWithPlaywright(urls) { const browser = await chromium.launch({ proxy: { server: PROXY_CONFIG.server }, headless: true, });

const results = [];

for (const url of urls) { const context = await browser.newContext({ httpCredentials: { username: PROXY_CONFIG.username, password: PROXY_CONFIG.password, }, userAgent: USER_AGENTS[Math.floor(Math.random() * USER_AGENTS.length)], viewport: { width: 1920, height: 1080 }, });

const page = await context.newPage();

try { const response = await page.goto(url, { waitUntil: "domcontentloaded", timeout: 30000, });

const status = response?.status() ?? 0; const content = await page.content();

// Check for CAPTCHA or block pages const isCaptcha = content.toLowerCase().includes("captcha") || content.toLowerCase().includes("verify you are human");

if (status === 200 && !isCaptcha && content.length > 1000) { results.push({ url, success: true, status, size: content.length }); } else { results.push({ url, success: false, reason: isCaptcha ? "captcha" : `status_${status}` }); } } catch (error) { results.push({ url, success: false, reason: error.message }); } finally { await context.close(); // Random delay between requests await new Promise((r) => setTimeout(r, 1000 + Math.random() * 2000)); } }

await browser.close(); return results; }

// Usage (async () => { const urls = ["https://example.com/product/1", "https://example.com/product/2"]; const results = await scrapeWithPlaywright(urls); const successful = results.filter((r) => r.success); console.log(`Success: ${successful.length}/${results.length}`); })(); ```

Go (net/http + concurrent scraping)

import ( "crypto/tls" "fmt" "io" "math/rand" "net/http" "net/url" "strings" "sync" "time" )

var userAgents = []string{ "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", "Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 Chrome/124.0.0.0 Safari/537.36", }

type ScrapeResult struct { URL string Success bool Status int Size int Error string }

func createProxyClient() *http.Client { proxyURL, _ := url.Parse("http://YOUR_USERNAME:YOUR_PASSWORD@gate.hexproxies.com:8080") return &http.Client{ Transport: &http.Transport{ Proxy: http.ProxyURL(proxyURL), TLSClientConfig: &tls.Config{InsecureSkipVerify: false}, }, Timeout: 30 * time.Second, } }

func scrapeURL(client *http.Client, targetURL string) ScrapeResult { req, err := http.NewRequest("GET", targetURL, nil) if err != nil { return ScrapeResult{URL: targetURL, Success: false, Error: err.Error()} }

req.Header.Set("User-Agent", userAgents[rand.Intn(len(userAgents))]) req.Header.Set("Accept", "text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8") req.Header.Set("Accept-Language", "en-US,en;q=0.9")

var lastErr error for attempt := 0; attempt < 3; attempt++ { resp, err := client.Do(req) if err != nil { lastErr = err time.Sleep(time.Duration(attempt+1) * 2 * time.Second) continue } defer resp.Body.Close()

body, _ := io.ReadAll(resp.Body) bodyStr := string(body)

if resp.StatusCode == 429 || resp.StatusCode == 503 { time.Sleep(time.Duration(attempt+1) * 2 * time.Second) continue }

isCaptcha := strings.Contains(strings.ToLower(bodyStr), "captcha") if resp.StatusCode == 200 && !isCaptcha && len(body) > 1000 { return ScrapeResult{URL: targetURL, Success: true, Status: 200, Size: len(body)} } return ScrapeResult{URL: targetURL, Success: false, Status: resp.StatusCode, Error: "blocked_or_captcha"} } return ScrapeResult{URL: targetURL, Success: false, Error: lastErr.Error()} }

func scrapeConcurrently(urls []string, concurrency int) []ScrapeResult { client := createProxyClient() results := make([]ScrapeResult, len(urls)) sem := make(chan struct{}, concurrency) var wg sync.WaitGroup

for i, u := range urls { wg.Add(1) go func(idx int, targetURL string) { defer wg.Done() sem <- struct{}{} results[idx] = scrapeURL(client, targetURL) time.Sleep(time.Duration(1000+rand.Intn(2000)) * time.Millisecond) <-sem }(i, u) } wg.Wait() return results }

func main() { urls := []string{"https://example.com/product/1", "https://example.com/product/2"} results := scrapeConcurrently(urls, 25) success := 0 for _, r := range results { if r.Success { success++ } } fmt.Printf("Success: %d/%d (%.1f%%)\n", success, len(results), float64(success)/float64(len(results))*100) } ```

Anti-Detection Best Practices

The Detection Stack

Modern anti-bot systems analyze requests at multiple layers:

1. **IP layer:** Is this IP from a datacenter, residential ISP, or mobile carrier? Is it on any blacklists? How many requests has it sent recently?
2. **TLS layer:** Does the TLS fingerprint match the claimed browser? (JA3/JA4 fingerprinting)
3. **HTTP layer:** Are headers in the right order? Is the Accept-Encoding header consistent with the User-Agent?
4. **Behavioral layer:** Is the request pattern human-like? Does it follow links naturally or request URLs in a predictable sequence?
5. **JavaScript layer:** Does the client execute JavaScript? Can it solve browser challenges?

Anti-Detection Checklist

**IP management:** - Rotate IPs at appropriate intervals (see category matrix above) - Use ISP or residential proxies for protected targets - Distribute requests across subnets (avoid hitting a site from the same /24 block)

**Header hygiene:** - Rotate User-Agent strings from a pool of 20+ real browser versions - Keep headers consistent with the claimed browser (Chrome UA should have Chrome-specific headers) - Include all standard headers: Accept, Accept-Language, Accept-Encoding, Connection, Upgrade-Insecure-Requests - Randomize header order slightly (some anti-bot systems detect fixed ordering)

**Behavioral patterns:** - Add random delays between requests (1–5 seconds for most targets) - Vary request timing — do not use perfectly uniform intervals - Follow pagination naturally (page 1, then page 2, not random pages) - Include referrer headers that match a realistic browsing path

**Technical measures:** - Use headless browsers (Playwright/Puppeteer) for JavaScript-heavy sites - Enable stealth plugins to mask automation signals - Handle cookies and sessions like a real browser - Respect robots.txt and rate limit headers (X-RateLimit, Retry-After)

Scaling Your Scraping Infrastructure

Small Scale (Under 10,000 Pages/Day)

• **Proxy type:** 10–25 ISP proxies or 2–5 GB residential
• **Infrastructure:** Single server or your local machine
• **Concurrency:** 5–15 concurrent connections
• **Cost:** $20–50/month

Medium Scale (10,000–100,000 Pages/Day)

• **Proxy type:** 50–100 ISP proxies or 10–30 GB residential
• **Infrastructure:** 1–2 dedicated servers with job queues (Redis, RabbitMQ)
• **Concurrency:** 25–50 concurrent connections
• **Cost:** $100–350/month

Large Scale (100,000+ Pages/Day)

• **Proxy type:** 200+ ISP proxies or 50+ GB residential
• **Infrastructure:** Distributed system with multiple workers, centralized scheduler, result storage
• **Concurrency:** 50–200 concurrent connections with per-domain throttling
• **Cost:** $400–1,500/month

Enterprise Scale (1M+ Pages/Day)

• **Proxy type:** 500+ ISP proxies plus residential for geo-diversity
• **Infrastructure:** Kubernetes cluster, auto-scaling workers, data pipeline (Kafka/Kinesis)
• **Concurrency:** 200–1,000 with dynamic throttling per target
• **Cost:** $1,000–5,000/month

How Hex Proxies Handles This

Hex Proxies is built specifically for high-volume scraping and automation workloads. Our infrastructure addresses every factor that affects scraping success:

**ISP proxies from $2.08/IP/month with unlimited bandwidth.** No per-GB charges means your cost does not scale with data volume. Run 1 million requests or 100 million — same price. This eliminates the most painful cost driver in large-scale scraping.

**97%+ success rate on protected sites.** Our ISP IPs are registered under tier-1 carrier ASNs (Comcast, Verizon, AT&T) and spread across diverse subnets. Anti-bot systems see them as legitimate residential connections, not proxy infrastructure.

**Sub-100ms latency.** Because we own our servers and network infrastructure, there is no third-party routing overhead. Requests go directly from our datacenter to the target site with minimal hops.

**Residential proxies for geo-diversity.** When you need IPs from specific countries or cities, our 10M+ residential IP pool covers 195 countries. Pricing starts at $4.25/GB with rotating or sticky session options.

**Simple integration.** All proxies use a single gateway endpoint (`gate.hexproxies.com`) with username/password authentication. Switching between ISP and residential, or between rotation settings, is a username parameter change — no code rewrite required.

Methodology

• **Test period:** March 10–17, 2026 (7 consecutive days)
• **Total requests:** 480,000 (120,000 per proxy type across 12 target categories)
• **Test locations:** US-East (Virginia), EU-West (Frankfurt), APAC (Tokyo)
• **Concurrency:** 25 connections per proxy type
• **Rate limiting:** 2-second minimum delay between requests to the same domain
• **Success criteria:** HTTP 200 with valid content (not CAPTCHA, block page, or empty response)
• **Cost calculation:** Based on publicly listed pricing for each proxy type as of March 2026
• **Last updated:** April 2026

Frequently Asked Questions

**What is the best proxy for web scraping in 2026?** ISP proxies deliver the best overall results for web scraping: 97%+ success rate on protected sites, sub-100ms latency, and the lowest cost per successful request at $0.00011. They are the recommended starting point for most scraping projects. Use residential proxies when you need geo-diversity or massive IP rotation.

**How many proxies do I need for web scraping?** For ISP proxies: plan on 1 IP per 50–100 requests per hour against protected sites. For 10,000 pages/day, 25–50 ISP IPs suffice. For residential proxies, the rotating pool handles IP management automatically — you just need enough bandwidth (approximately 1 GB per 350–700 pages at 1.5–3 MB each).

**Do I need residential or datacenter proxies for scraping?** It depends on the target. Unprotected sites (government data, news, public APIs) work fine with cheap datacenter proxies. Protected sites (e-commerce, social media, search engines) require residential or ISP proxies. ISP proxies give you residential-grade trust at datacenter speeds.

**What is a good success rate for web scraping proxies?** A good success rate on protected sites is 90%+ for residential proxies and 95%+ for ISP proxies. Below 85% indicates either the wrong proxy type for the target, insufficient rotation, or missing anti-detection measures (headers, delays, fingerprinting).

**How do I avoid getting blocked while scraping?** Use ISP or residential proxies (not datacenter), rotate User-Agent strings, add random delays between requests (1–5 seconds), include full browser headers, respect robots.txt, and limit concurrency to 25–50 connections per target domain. For JavaScript-heavy sites, use a headless browser like Playwright.

**Is web scraping legal?** Scraping publicly accessible data is generally legal in the US (see hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn, 2022). However, scraping behind authentication, ignoring robots.txt, or violating Terms of Service creates legal risk. GDPR adds restrictions in the EU for personal data collection. Always scrape responsibly — respect rate limits, do not overload servers, and consult legal counsel for sensitive use cases.

**Should I use a scraping API or manage proxies myself?** Scraping APIs (which bundle proxies, browser rendering, and CAPTCHA solving) are convenient but cost $1–5 per 1,000 requests — 10–50x more than managing proxies directly. For small-scale or occasional scraping, APIs save development time. For any volume above 50,000 requests/month, managing your own proxies with ISP IPs is significantly more cost-effective.

**What programming language is best for web scraping?** Python (with requests, aiohttp, or Scrapy) is the most popular choice due to its ecosystem of scraping libraries. Node.js (with Playwright or Puppeteer) excels at JavaScript-heavy sites. Go is best for high-performance concurrent scraping where throughput matters. All three work equally well with proxy integration.

**How fast can I scrape with proxies?** With 50 ISP proxies at 25 concurrent connections and 2-second delays, you can sustain roughly 12 requests per second (43,200 per hour). With 200 ISP proxies at 100 concurrent connections, throughput exceeds 50 requests per second (180,000 per hour). Actual speed depends on target site response time and your rate-limiting strategy.

**What is proxy rotation and how does it help scraping?** Proxy rotation assigns a different IP address to each request (or group of requests). This prevents a single IP from making too many requests to the same target, reducing the chance of being flagged or blocked. Residential proxies rotate automatically per-request. ISP proxies rotate via round-robin across your dedicated pool.

**Can I scrape Amazon, Google, or Instagram with proxies?** Yes, but each requires a different approach. Amazon responds best to ISP proxies with moderate rotation (96.8% success in our tests). Google requires residential proxies with careful rate limiting (88.5–94.1% success). Instagram public pages work with ISP proxies but mobile proxies are safest for any account-related actions (99.2% success).

**What is the difference between a scraping API and a proxy?** A proxy routes your HTTP requests through a different IP address. You handle everything else (browser rendering, CAPTCHA solving, parsing). A scraping API handles all of that for you and returns structured data. Proxies give you more control and lower cost. Scraping APIs give you convenience at a higher price.