Originally published on proxymint.
Cheap datacenter proxies are billed per IP or per GB, but value is set by how many requests return data. How to measure it, size an order and pick the tier.
TL;DR
- Count useful responses, not addresses. A port is billed per month, so what it returns is requests times success rate; at a 25% success rate it takes four requests to get one useful response.
- On lenient targets a port's bill does not follow volume. A dedicated IPv4 port is billed per month with no per-GB meter, so a million requests are billed the same as ten thousand.
- Size by concurrency and country, not by the target's limit. A target's rate limit covers the whole job, so more ports never buy more pace on one site.
- Datacenter addresses are labelled as hosting. IP databases flag hosting ranges, so platforms with anti-bot scoring and strict retail challenge them on sight.
Key takeaways
- Run a small-port test first. Measure 2xx, 403, 429 and challenge rates on 50-100 real pages before buying bulk.
- Size by concurrency, not by the target's limit. Ports needed equals parallel workers divided by workers per port, per country; the job's total pace stays inside what the target allows.
- Use ports for heavy pages. A port has no per-GB meter, so full renders at the 2.6 MB median page weight stay flat-priced.
- Match the tier before buying. Targets that score hosting ranges fit rotating residential per GB, and one-address work fits static ISP.
Read the full guide on proxymint, with the commands, tables and sources.
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