Measurements and field notes
What we learn running a proxy network, tested rather than asserted. Evergreen explainers live in the knowledge base; this is where the experiments go.
How Long Should You Hold a Sticky Session?
The last post argued that a residential IP has to behave like a household — cap the concurrency, pace the rate, jitter the spacing.
Read the post → 5 September 2026
Your Residential IP Is Clean. Your Request Rate Gives You Away.
The last post I wrote here was about geo signals — how a German exit IP means nothing if your Accept-Language, timezone and locale all still say "US developer laptop." A reader pushed back with a fair point: they'd…
Read the post → 1 September 2026
Your Proxy Is in Germany. The Rest of Your Client Isn't.
A reader on an earlier post described a scraper that was pulling Amazon listings through a rotating residential proxy and getting prices back in three different currencies inside one run.
Read the post → 25 August 2026
Before You Rotate the IP, Find Out What Actually Got Blocked
Something in your pipeline just started returning 403s, or a challenge page, or an empty 200 where there used to be JSON.
Read the post → 23 August 2026
Your scraper's retry logic is probably making the block worse
A 429, a 403 and a TLS reset are three different failures. Only two are worth retrying — and on targets that count volume rather than rate, no backoff schedule saves you.
Read the post → 21 August 2026
Stop reaching for a headless browser to scrape documentation sites
Docs sites are built by a handful of generators that leave the text in predictable places. Three routes get the content without launching a browser.
Read the post → 11 August 2026
What actually fails against Cloudflare: 28 requests, measured
Four combinations of exit IP and TLS stack against seven Cloudflare-fronted sites, every response logged. Including the JA3 result nobody mentions.
Read the post → 27 July 2026
Your proxy connected. That doesn't mean it hid your IP.
Every proxy checker I've come across answers one question: did the connection open?
Read the post → 25 July 2026
Playwright + Proxies: Sticky Sessions, Rotation, and the SOCKS5 Trap
You wired a proxy into requests in one line. Then you tried the same thing with Playwright and got a soup of ERR_TUNNEL_CONNECTION_FAILED, mystery CAPTCHAs, and a bandwidth bill that made no sense. Been there.
Read the post → 18 July 2026
Residential vs. Datacenter Proxies: Which One Do You Actually Need?
If you're scraping the web or managing multiple accounts, the residential-vs-datacenter question decides both your success rate and your bill.
Read the post → 14 July 2026
Building a Rotating Proxy Pool in Python That Survives Failures
If you scrape the web at any real scale, a single proxy will not cut it. IPs get rate-limited, temporarily banned, or simply time out.
Read the post → 13 July 2026
10,000 requests through our own network
The full benchmark: success rate, unique exit IPs, geo accuracy and latency across five countries — with the raw dataset published under CC BY 4.0.
See the data → July 2026