What I Learned After Testing Different Proxy Setups for Web Scraping

Sebastian Rantala — Wed, 29 Apr 2026 05:03:16 +0000

When I first got into web scraping, I assumed proxies were a solved problem.

Pick a provider, rotate IPs, done.

That turned out to be completely wrong.

The real problem

What surprised me the most wasn’t how to scrape data — it was how difficult it was to keep scraping consistently without getting blocked.

Even with rotating proxies, I kept running into:

sudden drops in success rate
inconsistent performance
random blocks after scaling up

At first I thought it was just bad implementation. But after testing different setups, it became clear that the proxy layer itself plays a much bigger role than I expected.

What actually made a difference

After trying multiple approaches, a few things stood out:

IP quality matters more than quantity
not all proxy networks behave the same under load
rotation strategy matters more than “rotate everything”

One of the biggest differences I saw was between datacenter and residential IPs.

Why residential proxies changed things

Once I switched to residential proxies, the stability improved noticeably.

Requests blended in better, sessions lasted longer, and overall success rates were much more predictable.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a completely different baseline.

Comparing providers is harder than it should be

Another challenge was figuring out which provider to actually use.

Most sites just repeat the same claims:

largest IP pool
best performance
highest success rate

But those don’t mean much without context.

I ended up putting together a simple comparison for myself just to make sense of the differences:
https://openwebdata.io/

Nothing fancy, just a way to compare things like performance, IP pool size and stability side by side.

Final thought

If you're working on scraping or data collection, the proxy setup is not something you can treat as an afterthought.