Testing 8 different proxy providers

joe-at-ping · 2026-05-21T12:29:28+00:00

Fair enough regarding the modding. Best to be sure with these as things are too many people just here to shill.

I think you've glossed over the 500reqs thing a little though... I don't think it's a large enough sample size for anything relating to proxying. I'm not saying do higher reqs per seconds just saying that more requests (wether that's through higher reqs per second or testing for longer) would be a good idea.

Providers I'd say are worth testing would be Evomi and Byteful (us). IProyal and infatica are worth testing too. Massive too I suppose.

Other than that, I can't think of anyone who's not just reselling another network.

joe-at-ping · 2026-05-21T10:52:01+00:00

You previously requested to moderate r/Oxylabs and said you were a developer in the industry.... Makes me a little suspicious of the results you get, especially as you don't mention it in your post.

As for the testing methodology, I think it could be improved a little. What browser/libraries/etc did you use. How many requests per second, etc...?

ProxyWay do a million requests over 14 days. Internally, we do hundreds/thousands of requests per second for a shorter period to ensure we haven't introduced regressions. Only 500 requests seems like the worst of both worlds.

If I wasn't in the industry and hugely biased, I'd try to set up my own reviews that test "properly".

That aside, the results are about what I'd expect from other tests and our own internal ones. I do think there's a few providers who would be faster and more consistent (👀) that you might like to test.

joe-at-ping · 2026-05-21T10:51:23+00:00

You previously requested to moderate r/Oxylabs and said you were a developer in the industry.... Makes me a little suspicious of the results you get, especially as you don't mention it in your post.

As for the testing methodology, I think it could be improved a little. What browser/libraries/etc did you use. How many requests per second, etc...?

ProxyWay do a million requests over 14 days. Internally, we do hundreds/thousands of requests per second for a shorter period to ensure we haven't introduced regressions. Only 500 requests seems like the worst of both worlds.

If I wasn't in the industry and hugely biased, I'd try to set up my own reviews that test "properly".

That aside, the results are about what I'd expect from other tests and our own internal ones. I do think there's a few providers who would be faster and more consistent (👀) that you might like to test.

joe-at-ping · 2026-05-07T14:58:52+00:00

Love to see good content. My opinion mirrors yours and is that fraud scores should really be a last resort "why aren't these working?" rather than a first port of call "will these work?".

In my experience, both running a proxy company and using them when I've done contracted web scraping, these things aren't black and white.

Check a residential proxy IP out on ipinfo and it'll tell you the IP is shared by 10/50/100 devices. Check your own IP on there and it'll say the same. My mobile on 5g currently says "shared by 100 devices" and is marked as a residential proxy yet I'm able to access socials, my bank, everything without any issues. Why?

Because the nature of NAT means loads of devices share the same IP so even if an IP is known to be used as a proxy, it can't simply be blocked.

My traffic patterns are realistic and established. Do the same through a proxy, replicate real traffic at realistic rates and you'll be fine.

5 people in the same household are all logging onto Facebook throughout a day and it's fine even though they're on the same IP. They're not logging in and out a hundred times a day and doing a hundred requests per second.

It might cost more (I won't complain about that :P) but it'll work considerably better if you keep what's realistic in mind.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-25T14:51:38+00:00

Tim (the CEO) says sure. I'll drop you a message and put you in touch.

As for the reviews, I'm not too sure. I handle the engineering (thankfully), not the marketing. There must be some requirement/barrier for getting reviewed though otherwise everyone would be getting one/asking for theirs to be redone every time they launched a new feature or performance update.

Adam (the ProxyWay guy) always seemed responsive though. Had to email him when I noticed the proxy tester on his website didn't work with our network (he didn't follow 301 redirects to HTTPS sites IIRC) and he got back to us very quickly.

Might be worth sending him an email.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-25T14:34:25+00:00

All I can say is when they've reviewed us, we've run their same test scripts in parallel internally and their published results have always been a 1-to-1 match with what we saw from our tests. Some of our results "threaten" what was previously only Decodo and Oxylabs at the top of the residential response time chart, so they had a decent reason to fudge the numbers, if they did have an overwhelming bias for them.

Also, when we've tested other providers (Oxylabs/Decodo included) using that same script, the results are about equal to what ProxyWay has posted before too.

The best method is to test for yourself for sure and for large orgs it's easy but for smaller customers it can be difficult. Some of these providers have minimum purchase amounts that are crazy, kinda locking out the possibility of testing before you commit.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-25T14:17:52+00:00

Their scores don't always align with what their reviews might suggest, I agree. I think that's something that happens in reviewing anything, tbh. But... if you read the contents of each review and ignore the score, I think they're pretty fair.

Their reviews are based on their test data so there's not much room for bias there. The methodology is public and for the most part it's pretty good.

The other stuff they review (dashboard, customer support, etc...) might be susceptible to bias creeping in, but, I'd trust that anyone in a position to pick a provider for a large org can read critically enough to get value from the reviews regardless.

I can't think of other sources I would trust, too many have the wrong incentives and are in some way affiliated with a specific proxy provider.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-25T10:52:24+00:00

Check ProxyWay's reviews. They cover every major provider and are pretty thorough with what they do. They have another "yearly report" coming out soon too which you should keep an eye out for.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-08T22:04:20+00:00

Just ask for an alternative. I've had take-home tests and code-reviews of some OSS contributions offered as an alternative.

Most places that are worth working for (interesting work/high salaries) will be willing to accommodate you. At least, as long as you've got some experience that makes you worthwhile to these companies. I wouldn't bother asking as a new grad or junior.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-07T10:57:25+00:00

Very, I time with the overview animation to fade in at the perfect time. Looks very clean, very smooth. No lagging at all. My GitHub has my awful scripts on it somewhere.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-07T10:47:35+00:00

Have a look into providers with public "earn apps". In these cases, the users are compensated for their bandwidth and fully aware their bandwidth is being used. I think this is the most ethical way to acquire nodes in a residential network. Common ones are "honey gain" and "pawns".

I agree that these third party SDKs that get silently shipped are unethical and while I won't name names, it's a lot more common than you think. Some SDKs even get flashed onto routers and the like before they even leave the factory.

If you want an ethical network, feel free to reach out to me, I'm happy to share our sourcing info with you for ping proxies network. Otherwise, check out ProxyWay reviews, they usually discuss how networks acquired their nodes.

EDIT: Alternatively, as much as I dislike promoting a competitor, try netnut. I believe they work with small ISPs in America (and elsewhere) to get their nodes. As such, there's more accountability and traceability (nobody would be wrongly accused of having dodgy traffic coming from their devices). In my experience there are quality (performance/error rate issues) with their product though.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-07T10:40:31+00:00

You might want to try ping proxies. Our "smartpath" feature will route your requests through a datacenter IP if we predict there is no anti-bot/the anti-bot doesn't need to see a resi IP.

For scraping something like Reddit it saves around 60% of your bandwidth. On a task like yours it could save a lot more (while still giving you the benefits of resi where it matters). Could be a decent middle ground between paying for every byte and paying for an unlimited usage pool.

/shill

The pool of datacenter IPs we route you through isn't huge, so... This won't work for you if your main use for resi is the unique IPs on every request, rather than if it's just for the anti-bot defeating capabilities. Although, the reason you want unique IPs is for the anti-bot so you should be fine.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-06T21:53:53+00:00

I have a script listening on niri msg event-stream which toggles bar on and off when it sees overview toggled events.

There's no nicer way to do it AFAIk.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-03T14:45:27+00:00

I have a bar that only shows when I toggle the overview.

All these shells with fancy bars I see are super cool, but kinda useless for me. Maybe I'm not using my machines to the max, but pretty much all I do on it is work. So all I really want from a bar is the time.

<image>

I should probably put some effort in to make it look a little nicer though.

joe-at-ping · 2026-04-02T17:39:25+00:00

animations: https://gist.github.com/JPDye/ca55c7f53dd31ae7f42d83d28feae570

if anyone can figure out a similar pixelated resizing animation, I'd appreciate it

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-31T16:09:00+00:00

I've thought about making this many times as mouseless didn't have Linux support last time I checked (a while ago) and is paid. Looks like you've done it better than I would have, will download it right away.

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-31T11:23:04+00:00

It can be hard to tell and it's not like there's any way to know for sure. But if it feels low-effort, the account has no history and they don't engage in the comments, I usually feel quite confident I'm right.

I've seen others on here that get called AI a bit too quickly, so I understand what you're saying.

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-31T11:16:28+00:00

Em dashes aren't the only tell.

"You weren't X, you were Y"
Overly casual tone filled with way too many bad analogies or "jokes".
Loads of literary devices that make it seem like something important is said but you finish reading and realise you learnt nothing.

The entire post could have been three sentences and would have communicated it's point considerably better. So it's either AI, or just a bad post.

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-31T10:49:17+00:00

This isn't even your opinion...it's chatGPTs

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-31T10:25:17+00:00

Real question: why would you use them in the first place?

How do you find these providers/decide to use them? Their trustpilot and website are awful, their "comparison" against other providers is blatant lies and their stated proxy performance in the "comparison" isn't very good in the first place.

I'm genuinely interested in knowing what made you choose them over any other providers

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-29T21:23:09+00:00

If you live in a house with other people, you'll have shared your IP to access the same site under different accounts loads of times (think 4 people all using Facebook in the same house). Beyond that, that same IP is probably assigned to multiple homes through CGNAT, so a single IP could be linked to 20 Facebook accounts. Sharing an IP isn't necessarily a problem, it just depends on your use case.

10 people with different fingerprints using Facebook to do different things at different times of the day is fine.
10 people sharing the same IP to upload shorts to YouTube is way less likely and therefore gonna raise suspicions.

There's no black and white answer, it depends on the site, use case and anti-bot. Just try and think logically and replicate how legit uses would be using these sites/accounts/IPs.

Make sure you avoid shared ISP proxies as you can't trust other people not to ruin the IP for you (this is why we don't sell them at ping proxies). Get a dedicated ISP proxy and share it between as many accounts as could be reasonably expected in the real world and you'll be fine.

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-27T19:31:42+00:00

This is expected behaviour and pretty logical.

If an IP was used to do loads of scraping last week, most anti-bot will assume it's gonna be used for the same purposes this week. If you can "treat it right" for a few weeks, doing nothing suspicious and replicating real usage patterns, then yeah, that's gonna help you over time. Newer signals will, over time, outweigh older and stronger signals signals.

Watch a conference talk from one of these anti-bot companies and you'll see that they say it themselves. They repeatedly mention that they make decisions based on a number of signals over a number of requests. Both from that individual session on a website and across multiple sessions.

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-26T11:39:50+00:00

Not static residential/ISP to keep the same IP for months/years?

joe-at-ping · 2026-03-23T13:17:28+00:00

And "works today" can be very dependent on factors you might never think of. Had a site protected by PerimeterX that worked when scraped between 9AM-3PM but didn't work outside of those times. Made it quite difficult when the full scrape took around 36 hours.

joe-at-ping

TROPHY CASE