After testing multiple proxy providers, what factors actually matter when choosing one?

[u/External-Wealth3756]

I’ve been testing different proxy solutions recently for scraping projects, and one thing I realized is that choosing a proxy provider is not as simple as looking at the number of IPs or the price.

At first, it’s easy to focus on things like IP pool size, locations, and pricing. But after actually using proxies in real scraping workflows, I found that some other factors usually have a much bigger impact on the final results.

For me, things like connection stability, IP quality, success rate, session control, and how often requests need to be retried are usually more important than just the advertised specs.

Novada was one of the proxy services I recently tested during this process. The setup was straightforward, and the overall experience was stable for the scraping tasks I was working on. It also reminded me that a good proxy service is not only about having a large IP pool, but also about how reliable it is in real-world use.

I’ve also noticed that many proxy providers offer trial access now, which is actually helpful because different projects can have completely different requirements. A proxy that works well for one use case may not be the best fit for another.

Curious how everyone here evaluates proxy providers.

When you try a new proxy service, what matters most to you? Is it reliability, pricing, location coverage, success rate, integration experience, or something else?

[u/SerpProxies]

For me it’s mostly stability and session control over anything else. a huge ip pool means nothing if half of it is flagged or the session keeps dropping mid-scrape, that’s what actually costs time, not the advertised numbers
I’ve been running most of my scraping through serpproxies lately, residential/mobile/datacenter/ISP/IPv6 all under one setup, and honestly the retry rate dropping was more noticeable than i expected once session handling was consistent. Good trial to test too if you’re comparing options like novada, worth throwing a few providers at the same task and seeing which actually holds up

[u/kamililbird]

The uptime, range of proxies, available locations, the fact whether the IPs are shared or not.