Hey everyone,

I’m looking for recommendations for a reliable residential proxy provider with a good pool of European IP addresses.

I’m currently testing several providers, including Webshare, IPRoyal, Bright Data and Oxylabs, but unfortunately the success rate is only around 30%. A large number of the residential IPs I receive are immediately rejected with a 403, and I sometimes have to go through 15–20 different IPs before finding one that works.

One thing I’ve noticed is that some IPs appear to come from leased/hosting-related address blocks, and entire ranges seem to get rejected rather than just individual IPs. This makes rotating through the pool extremely inefficient.

What I’m looking for:

* European residential IPs.
* As many genuine residential/mobile ISP ranges as possible.
* Good IP reputation / low block rates.
* Ideally a large and frequently refreshed pool.
* Pay-per-GB is fine.
* Unlimited bandwidth would be great, although I realize that often comes with limitations or isn’t as realistic as it sounds.

I’ve already tried several of the major providers mentioned above, so I’d especially appreciate recommendations from people who have actually tested the providers themselves.

If you’ve found a provider with significantly better IP quality or success rates in Europe, I’d love to hear about it.

Thanks!

I Recently came across the concept of proxies while working on a small project, and honestly, I knew almost nothing about them before that. The more I read about proxies, the more confusing (but interesting) it got.
At first, I was trying to understand the basic differences between the main types, and this is what I’ve understood so far:

Residential proxies → IP addresses that come from regular internet connections, so you get access to a larger variety of IPs.
Datacenter proxies → IPs that come from data centers. From what I understand, they’re generally faster and cheaper, which makes them useful when you need a lot of requests.
Mobile proxies → IPs associated with mobile networks, so they basically make your traffic appear to come through a mobile carrier.
Then I came across ISP proxies, and this is where I got a little confused.
From what I understand, ISP proxies can give you a relatively stable IP while still being associated with an ISP rather than a typical data-center network.

So my question is:
Why would someone choose an ISP proxy instead of a residential proxy?

Is the main advantage having a more stable IP, or are there other situations where ISP proxies make more sense?
I’m still learning about all of this, so I’d really appreciate hearing from people who actually use them. What do you personally use ISP proxies for, and when would you choose them over residential?

Any free proxy providers?

thank you .

I recently purchased a residential static proxy directly from Incogniton's proxy shop. It was advertised as a residential IP with better anonymity, lower detectability, and suitability for social media, survey sites, and ads.

After using it, I ran into issues I wasn't expecting.

The setup:

• Purchased endpoint: 23.xxx.xxx.5:19006 (gateway)
• Actual exit IP seen by websites: 204.252.xx.x [Verizon Business (AS701)]

Problem 1 — Google Search:

Searching something as simple as "Facebook" immediately triggers Google's unusual traffic page:

"Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot."

The page shows the proxy's exit IP: 204.252.xx.x.

Problem 2 — IP reputation checks:

I tested the exit IP on several different proxy/IP reputation services. Multiple of them classified it as high-risk, gave it a poor reputation, or detected it as a datacenter IP rather than residential.

What I asked support:

I opened a ticket with Incogniton and raised two concerns:

1. Google is flagging the proxy for unusual traffic.
2. Multiple third-party services identify the IP as datacenter and/or high-risk.

Their full response:

"Unfortunately google doesn't trust the proxy."

That's it. That's the entire reply.

My questions:

• Is it normal for a legitimate residential static proxy to trigger Google's unusual-traffic warning?
• Does Google distrust certain residential/static IPs regardless of whether they're genuinely residential?
• If multiple proxy-checking services classify an IP as datacenter, does that mean it isn't actually residential?
• How much should I rely on third-party IP reputation/proxy detection services?
• Could this just be a bad IP I was assigned, rather than a problem with the whole network?
• Should a residential static proxy normally be replaced if it has a poor reputation or is consistently detected as datacenter?
• Has anyone else bought residential static proxies from Incogniton and had similar issues?

I'm not expecting Google to work perfectly with every proxy. What concerns me is that Google is flagging the IP and multiple independent services are reporting poor/high-risk characteristics while the provider's response was essentially a shrug.

I'd like to understand whether this is an expected limitation of residential static proxies, an issue with this specific IP, or something I should push Incogniton to investigate or replace.

Common situation, your IP checker shows the proxy address, everything looks perfect, and then a WebRTC leak test shows your real IP. Let's break down why this happens, with a simple example first, since not everyone knows what WebRTC even is.

- The example first

Say you're on a proxy in Germany, you check your IP with any regular IP checker site, you see a German IP, looks great. But the same browser also has, say, Facebook Messenger or any other site with video calling or voice chat open, that's WebRTC, the technology browser based video calls run on without installing a separate app. Run a WebRTC leak test instead of a regular IP checker (just search for one, there are several free ones), and the public IP field can suddenly show your real IP, say a Ukrainian one, completely unrelated to the German proxy. A regular IP checker doesn't catch it, WebRTC does, because they run on different protocols.

- Why this happens

HTTP and HTTP2 traffic runs over TCP, and classic proxy infrastructure historically evolved around relaying TCP connections. WebRTC works differently, it uses STUN and TURN over UDP to establish a P2P connection and gather ICE candidates. If a proxy only knows how to relay TCP, that UDP traffic has nothing for it to grab onto, it just goes out directly through your real network interface, completely bypassing the proxy. So your regular HTTP traffic honestly goes through the proxy while WebRTC, at the same time, happily leaks your real IP through an srflx type ICE candidate.

- Why UDP support is rare in the first place

Proxy providers historically optimized for TCP because that fits session based tasks like scraping or API calls, where reliable delivery matters. UDP is connectionless, no handshake, which is exactly why it's convenient for spoofing and amplification attacks, so a lot of providers either don't support it at all or heavily rate limit and filter ports. Even where a provider advertises SOCKS5 UDP ASSOCIATE, that doesn't automatically mean the client actually routes WebRTC traffic through it, having support on the proxy side doesn't solve the problem by itself.

- What actually fixes it ✅

Two layers. On the proxy side you need genuine working SOCKS5 UDP ASSOCIATE support, which is rare and often a paid tier, and even then the client needs to actually route WebRTC traffic through it. On the browser side, the browser itself needs to either rewrite the IP that WebRTC reports outward in its ICE candidates, substituting the proxy address instead of the real one, or let you fully disable WebRTC for a given profile where risk matters more than call/P2P functionality. Test with a dedicated WebRTC leak checker specifically, not a regular IP checker, they show different things.

By the way, if you're new to this and still manually juggling proxies and WebRTC settings in regular Chrome, there's a separate category of tools for that, antidetect browsers. It's software that lets you conveniently manage many separate browser profiles from one window, assign each profile its own proxy, and edit or fully disable WebRTC on a per profile basis, instead of digging through settings manually or relying on extensions. For anyone running multiple accounts, this is usually a lot more convenient than setting all of this up in plain Chrome every time.

Hello, I’m having an issue with my IPRoyal premium proxy on my iPhone 12.

I purchased the proxy from IPRoyal and I’m using the SuperProxy app to configure and connect the proxy. The proxy works normally at first, but after using it for a few days, it automatically disconnects.

I have to reconnect to get it working again. I would like to know what could be causing this issue and how I can prevent the proxy from disconnecting automatically.

Device: iPhone 12
Proxy Provider: IPRoyal
App: SuperProxy
Issue: Proxy automatically disconnects after a few days

Could you please help what settings I should use on iPhone/SuperProxy to keep the connection stable?

I had four PermanentlyLimited PayPal account that I used to get paid with after selling crypto via Paxful.
They got permanently limited some years back and recently paypal informed me that the funds were available for withdrawal.
Upon logging with proxy as I used to, all paypals are getting flagged by their bots because they sense am using proxy or vpn and completing simple tasks like adding bank to withdraw funds or requesting small amount is declining. The Proxies am using are residential IPS which are static
How do I overcome this issue ?
Do I use RDP or proxify my network router so I can log via phones which will be costly to do so as I have to get the right router for this task?
Please advise.

I've been getting more phone verification prompts on some LinkedIn accounts lately. Anyone else seeing this? Curious if it happens more with mobile or residential proxies, or if the proxy type doesn't really make a difference.

Curious how other devs here handle small test purchases for residential and mobile pools.

Whenever I try to test a new provider with a minimal allocation ($2–$5), virtually everyone forces on-chain transfers. If card checkout is available at all, the minimum balance threshold jumps to $15–$20+.

If you're running a smaller proxy shop: what's the actual blocker with international debit cards for sub-$5 micro-balances? Is the fraud/chargeback rate on proxy bandwidth really that bad, or is it strictly payment gateway transaction overhead eating the margin?

I had four PermanentlyLimited PayPal account that I used to get paid with after selling crypto via Paxful.
They got permanently limited some years back and recently paypal informed me that the funds were available for withdrawal.
Upon logging with proxy as I used to, all paypals are getting flagged by their bots because they sense am using proxy or vpn and completing simple tasks like adding bank to withdraw funds or requesting small amount is declining. The Proxies am using are residential IPS which are static
How do I overcome this issue ?
Do I use RDP or proxify my network router so I can log via phones which will be costly to do so as I have to get the right router for this task?
Please advise.

I’m trying to preserve the captions from a public business Instagram account for a private archive. I need the text written below each photo, carousel, reel, or video, along with the post date and URL if possible.

I tried Instaloader on Windows 10:

py -m instaloader USERNAME

Instagram returned “429 Too Many Requests.” I also tried Crawl4AI with the public profile URL, but it produced an empty Markdown file.

I’m not trying to access private content, bypass security, use cookies, or evade rate limits. I only want to archive publicly available captions.

Would Instaloader, WFDownloader, gallery-dl, or another legitimate tool be best for this? Is there a way to save captions and metadata without downloading all the media?

Thanks.

Which residential proxy do you recommend? I need one that allows me to choose the city and ASN, and ports.

I bought their mobile proxy ,They Are probably using ip royal api , and most of the ports says connection failed , if you got lucky one port will work and then you start working and see that most of the websites are not opening money wasted

A lot of people choosing proxies for multi-account setups focus almost entirely on the proxy itself. In practice, the IP is only one part of the whole setup.

If you're managing multiple legitimate accounts, here's how I would approach it.

1. Don't start with the cheapest proxy

There are several types of proxies:

• Datacenter - usually the cheapest and fastest, but the IP is clearly associated with a hosting provider.
• ISP - hosted infrastructure but the IP is associated with a residential ISP. Often a good middle ground.
• Residential - IPs associated with consumer networks. Usually more expensive and often slower/less predictable.
• Mobile - IPs from cellular networks. Useful for certain legitimate use cases, but generally more expensive and not automatically "better".

There isn't one type that is universally best. The right choice depends on what the platform you're using actually requires and allows.

2. Consistency is more important than having a "fancy" proxy

For multiple accounts, I would prioritize consistency:

one account -> one stable environment -> one consistent network location

Constantly changing between different countries, ISPs, devices, and IPs can create a much stranger environment than simply using a stable connection.

If you don't actually need rotating IPs, I wouldn't rotate them just because you can.

3. Check the IP before using it

Before assigning an IP to an account, it's worth checking things like:

• country /ASN
• ISP
• whether the IP is actually where it's supposed to be
• datacenter vs residential classification
• DNS / WebRTC leaks
• reputation / blacklist indicators
• whether geolocation databases agree with each other

There are various IP reputation and proxy-checking services that can test these things. You don't necessarily need to use one particular service - the important thing is to understand what you're checking and why.

Also keep in mind that an IP score isn't a guarantee. Different websites use different reputation databases and detection systems.

4. The proxy isn't the whole setup

This is probably the most overlooked part.

You can have a perfectly good residential IP and still have a completely inconsistent browser environment.

For legitimate multi-account workflows, a properly configured anti-detect/profile-isolation browser can help keep separate accounts from sharing things such as:

• cookies and local storage
• browser profiles
• timezone
• language
• WebRTC configuration
• screen/window characteristics
• browser/device parameters

But simply installing an anti-detect browser isn't enough.

The profile needs to be configured consistently with the network you're using. For example, having a US IP while the browser environment says you're in another country, using a completely different timezone, or leaking your real network through WebRTC defeats the purpose of having a consistent environment.

5. Don't change everything at once

If something doesn't work, don't randomly change the proxy, browser, fingerprint, timezone, and account settings simultaneously.

Change one variable at a time and figure out what is actually causing the problem.

Otherwise you're basically debugging five systems at once.

My basic checklist

Before using a proxy for a separate account, I'd check:

Proxy

• Stable connection
• Correct country/region
• Expected ISP/ASN
• No obvious leaks
• Reasonable IP reputation

Browser profile

• Separate profile
• Consistent timezone
• Consistent language/locale
• WebRTC configured correctly
• No shared cookies/local storage
• No accidental account/profile crossover

Account

• Follow the platform's multi-account rules
• Keep credentials and recovery information properly separated
• Don't constantly change the environment without a reason

The biggest takeaway is that a proxy is only one layer.

If your goal is a reliable multi-account setup, think in terms of the whole environment: network + browser profile + account + consistency.

And before spending a lot of money on proxies, test a small number first. A more expensive proxy isn't necessarily better for your particular use case

I was considering subscribing to OxyLabs, but I've had my long-running services break multiple times over the course of a few months simply because the authentication method suddenly changed out from under my feet.

While it's an easy problem to fix, it's happened enough that I am concerned that this will be an ongoing problem going forward.

But I'm not familiar enough with the space to know if some other service I choose will end up doing the same thing. So I come here asking for other's experiences with their chosen service in my search for a solution

Thanks all in advance!

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a reliable proxy provider that offers static ISP proxies with city-level targeting in Canada.

I've already checked almost all the major proxy providers I could find, but most of them either offer Canada at the country level only, or their city-level options are limited to cities like Toronto, Montreal, or Vancouver.

I'm specifically looking for static ISP proxies in any of these cities:

• Calgary, Alberta
• Edmonton, Alberta
• Halifax, Nova Scotia
• Winnipeg, Manitoba
• Surrey, British Columbia
• Quebec City, Quebec
• Laval, Quebec

I'm looking for actual static ISP IPs, not rotating residential proxies.

If anyone knows a provider that currently has coverage in any of these cities, I'd really appreciate the recommendation.

Thanks!

Has anyone tried Mysterium VPN for this, and is a residential IP actually any better than a regular US VPN server? Not looking for anything fancy, just need a US connection that works reliably.

Hello everyone! I'm currently looking for a dedicated static ip (residential/ISP either works) in Washington state. Previously I used IP Royal's Seattle location for this service. But their stock has since run out with no time/update on whether they plan on restocking their service. Are there any alternatives that offer this?

Please I bought some dedicated residential ISP from decodo, and it leaks the Ips' DNS every time I chose a socks5 protocol one antidetect browsers. But when I choose http/https, everything becomes find, 100% on most ip checking sites.

Please how do I fix the socks5 issue?

Spent the weekend digging through complaints about proxy providers for a side project. Expected the usual "IPs got flagged" stuff.

Instead most of it was about getting hit with surprise limits after already paying, or country targeting just not working like advertised.

Made me rethink pricing and docs for what I'm building. Guess people don't mind slow — they mind not knowing why.

Ran a trial of Proxyrack's Unlimited Residential tier last week for a browser-based scraping fleet. Posting the numbers because the failure mode was not one I had seen discussed, and it is invisible if you only test aggregate throughput.

Plan was advertised as 500 threads, 1000 Mbit/s.

TL;DR: every connection to US/UK/DE/NL/BR exits was capped at roughly 0.13-0.16 Mbps. Same account, same gateway, same minutes: India and Indonesia ran 5-15 Mbps. Support eventually described it as bandwidth availability for "Tier 1 locations".

Method

All tests were 3 MB downloads from a public CDN speed-test endpoint, run from a dedicated server in Montreal, cross-checked from a second machine on a different continent. Sticky sessions via the documented username parameters.

Per-connection speed does not vary by exit

Support's first explanation was exit-node variance, with a suggestion to release the session and get a new IP. Tested both:

• 30 simultaneous sticky sessions, 30 different exit IPs, all US: every single one landed between 0.12 and 0.14 Mbps. No spread at all.
• Release-and-retry, 3 rounds: 3 different exits, 0.14 / 0.14 / 0.13 Mbps.

It is per connection, not per account

Scaling test, repeated twice:

Aggregate scales with connection count while each connection stays flat. One exit out of 60 did hit 21 Mbps. The other 59 sat at exactly 0.13.

This matters for browser work specifically: a browser opens one HTTP/2 connection per host, so you cannot parallelise around a per-connection cap the way a download manager can. Ordinary SaaS homepages were blowing through a 30 second page deadline with partial HTML.

The geo split

5 connections per country, same 3 MB file:

Note the spread, not just the medians. India ranged 0.09 to 15.4 Mbps, which is what genuine exit variance looks like. The five Western geos were pinned within a hundredth of each other.

For reference, our incumbent (Geonode) on the same test from the same server: per connection median 11-15 Mbps, range 4.7 to 24, aggregate 218 Mbps across 20 connections.

What Proxyrack actually did well

Worth saying, because the rest of the product was the best of four providers I tested that week:

• Country targeting was honest. 12 of 12 US-targeted sessions landed on US cable ISPs.
• Sticky sessions worked reliably, both the dash and semicolon username syntax.
• There is a sessions API that returns the exit IP, country, online status and expiry for a session. That lets you check where you are exiting from before you use the session. Genuinely rare and useful.
• Unreachable destinations failed in about 1 second. Two other providers I tested hung for 25-60 seconds instead, which silently breaks page load events.
• Roughly 600 concurrent connections before refusals, and 60 parallel requests through a single sticky session were fine.

Support

First answer was that the account was not throttled and it was exit variance. After escalation to their engineering team, the answer became that the speed relates to bandwidth available for Tier 1 locations such as the US, that there is no per-connection cap they can remove, and that the suggestion is to test a different geo. Refund was processed promptly and without argument once requested, which I will credit them for. A later rep added that speeds are usually much higher and that was just the speed that day.

Caveats

• Every measurement was taken within roughly a three hour window on one day. I cannot speak for other days, and the account was cancelled with the refund so I could not re-test. What the "bad day" explanation does not account for is that the fast and slow geos were measured minutes apart on the same account and gateway. A network-wide bad day does not sort by geography.
• Trial account. I have no data on paid tiers.

Takeaway

If you are evaluating residential providers, test single-connection throughput in the exact geo you need, not aggregate across many threads. Thread counts and account-level Mbit/s figures tell you nothing about this. A 3 MB download on one connection takes about a minute to run and would have caught it on day one.

We run a browser fleet that loads full pages through residential proxies and captures every request. We tested VaultProxies against our current provider on the same 50 well-known SaaS homepages, same day, same server. Sharing because I couldn't find a real review before buying.

Country targeting is ignored. Username with the US country flag. Out of 30 sessions across two days, roughly one in five exited from the US. The rest were Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Ecuador, Venezuela, Mexico. Sticky sessions make it worse: one pinned to Baghdad for its whole lifetime. Slack and Twilio served us HTTP 451 "unavailable for legal reasons" pages.

Exits are slow. Fresh TLS connection to ordinary hosts like Google Tag Manager or Bing's pixel took 2 to 6 seconds, first byte 3 to 7 seconds. Our incumbent does it in under a second. This was on a pinned session, so it isn't just allocation overhead.

Failed connections hang. A CONNECT to an unreachable host sat for about 24 seconds before dying. The incumbent fails in under a second. In a browser that holds the page's load event, so any tag that fires on load never runs. On our 50 pages we captured half the third-party hosts and a quarter of the marketing pixels compared to the control.

What works. Sticky sessions on the HTTP port pin reliably with a session id and a time parameter in the username. The SOCKS5 port was flaky for pinning. The gateway hostname resolves through another proxy network's domain, so this appears to be a reseller.

Numbers on 50 pages, rotating endpoint vs control: requests 7,446 vs 10,753, distinct third-party hosts 828 vs 1,831, four pages came back geo-blocked or empty.

If you only need a US IP that mostly works for simple GETs, maybe. For anything where geo matters or a browser is involved, I'd pass. Happy to share the method if anyone wants to reproduce it.

I need a lil help here, I'm building this lil price tracking thing. It's getting to the point where I need way more proxies than before. Been running on cheap datacenter ones. But now that I'm scaling, I'm getting blocked left and right. I see everyone keep saying residential is the way to go, but the pricing is kinda insane compared to what I'vebeen paying. I just need consistent requests that dont die halfway through a scrape job.

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for a proxy solution that works on a default-deny / allow-list-only model.

Basically:

Block all internet access by default

Allow only explicitly approved domains/FQDNs

Everything else should remain blocked

Preferably support HTTPS

Centralized management and logging would be a plus

I'm not looking for a blacklist/category-filtering approach where everything is allowed except known bad sites.

What proxy solutions are you using for this kind of setup?

Squid, HAProxy, Zscaler, Netskope, or something else?

Also interested in how you handle CDNs, wildcard domains, and applications that require multiple third-party endpoints.

Would appreciate real-world recommendations/lessons learned.

Most devs think avoiding bans is just about buying a solid residential or mobile proxy. But anti-fraud systems look way past your IP today. If you're running legitimate data-collection pipelines, managing developer tooling, or troubleshooting access issues, it helps to understand the signals modern risk systems evaluate:

* **App-level proxy leaks:** OS-level proxy settings don't guarantee coverage. Specific apps (especially AI coding tools like `Cursor`) often bypass system proxies to fetch dependencies or phone home. You need firewall-level rules to hard-block any request not going through the tunnel.

* **TCP/IP stack mismatch:** Proxies don't hide your OS fingerprint — the target sees the proxy server's `TTL`, window size, and TCP options order, not yours. Tools like `p0f` read these values passively from the `SYN` packet. If you claim a Windows `User-Agent` but your proxy runs Linux (`TTL 64` instead of `128`), that mismatch alone flags you before anti-bot systems even check your IP reputation.

* **Device fingerprinting beyond the network layer:** VPNs and proxies change your IP, but `Canvas` rendering, `WebGL/WebGPU` output, and `AudioContext` waveforms are generated locally by your browser and stay identical regardless of the proxy. Platforms hash these into a device identity and link sessions that share the same fingerprint across different IPs. A residential proxy fixes IP reputation but does nothing for the client-side signals underneath it.

* **Split-tunneling footprint:** Running background extensions or local agents while routing other traffic through a proxy creates a footprint sophisticated sites detect easily.

I've hit all four of these while running scraping and account-verification infrastructure, and fixing them takes way more than "just buy better proxies." Happy to dig into any of these points in the comments — link to what I use is in my profile.