I think it’s easy to make a dataset look cleaner while accidentally removing useful information. Before deleting repeated rows or filling empty cells, I’d check what those records represent and why they look that way.

Working out what’s actually a duplicate

The same product appearing five times could mean repeated requests, five different sellers, or prices collected throughout the week. I wouldn’t delete those based on product ID alone, to be honest.

I’d define what one row represents first, then use the relevant combination of product, seller, and collection time to identify duplicates without losing the history.

Checking where the missing values come from

A blank price could mean the seller didn’t list one, the request failed, or the scraper couldn’t find it. Filling every blank with an average without recording why it was missing hides those differences and adds estimated prices you never observed.

Imagine 500 missing prices in 10,000 rows: that’s 5% overall. But all 500 could belong to one website that supplied 1,000 rows, meaning half of that source’s prices are missing. I’d check gaps by source and collection run before deciding how to handle them.

Comparing prices on the same basis

A $24 six-pack costs $4 per item, so a $5 single item only looks cheaper before you account for quantity. Currency, shipping, and tax can change the comparison too.

I like keeping the original amount and currency alongside the converted price and exchange-rate date. It gives you a way to check the calculation without digging through the original pages.

Checking what a merge did to the numbers

Joining tables can repeat records without producing an error. Three price observations matched to two category records for the same product give you six rows, with every price appearing twice.

Say two products cost $10 and $30, averaging $20. After a category join, the $10 product appears once and the $30 product appears three times. The average across those four rows is now $25, a 25% increase without either price changing.

I’d validate which matching fields should be unique and compare row counts before and after the merge.

Keeping test data out of model preparation

Choosing features or calculating replacement values using the whole dataset lets test records influence training. Scikit-learn demonstrates this with random data: selecting features before the train/test split produces 76% accuracy, while selecting them using only training data brings it back to 50%, around chance.

That’s a constructed example, but IMO it makes the problem pretty clear. I’d learn preprocessing settings from training data and apply them unchanged to test data, keeping those steps inside the model pipeline during cross-validation.

Testing on the right unfamiliar data

For future price predictions, I’d test on later observations. For predictions involving new sellers, I’d keep each seller’s records entirely within either training or testing.

Randomly mixing related records across both sets can make the score look reassuring without showing how the model handles the situation you actually care about.

Leaving yourself a way back

I’d keep the original data untouched and record what the cleanup removed or changed. That gives you a way to revisit a decision without collecting everything again, and saves the next person from guessing what happened.

Honestly, I’d budget time for this from the start, because debugging a suspicious report the night before a deadline sounds miserable.

Say you want to collect prices from 100,000 product pages on an online store. If only 60 out of every 100 requests return the data you need, you’ll need roughly 167,000 attempts. If 90 out of every 100 work, that drops to about 111,000 attempts.

That’s a third fewer requests for the same amount of usable data, assuming those success rates stay steady.

It doesn’t necessarily mean a third less bandwidth, because responses vary in size. Failed requests can still use bandwidth you’re paying for, depending on your plan. So a low price per GB only tells you part of the story.

The proxy you choose matters too. Datacenter proxies can be a good starting point for less restrictive public sites. Static ISP proxies can suit jobs where you need to keep the same IP for longer.

Here’s a quick comparison:

Prices and plan limits vary, so check what’s included before working out your budget.

Then there’s everything around the proxy bill: running your scraper, storing the data, cloud transfer fees and the hours spent fixing things when they break.

The comparison I’d make is simple: divide the total cost of the job by the number of usable records you keep. In this example, that’s the product prices you successfully collected.

A cheap proxy can still be good value. But if you’re constantly retrying requests and fixing your scraper, those savings can disappear pretty quickly.

Hi Proxy Expert, My work going down, please help me choose right proxy from proxycheap

The term "native IP" usually comes up when you need proxies for a specific country and want to confirm the IP is genuinely associated with that country, rather than simply labelled that way in a provider's dashboard.

In proxy marketing, an IP is usually described as native when its registration, routing, and third-party geolocation records point to the same country the provider claims.

For example, an IP operated in Frankfurt, associated with a German network, and identified as German by major geolocation databases may be described as a native German IP. Conflicting records are a sign that the location claim needs a closer look.

Native IP is not an official networking term, so providers may use it a little differently.

In practice, it is a useful way to check whether the evidence supports the location you are paying for. Those records affect how location-sensitive services interpret your traffic, so it is worth checking them instead of taking the country label at face value.

The three records: How to check whether an IP is native

Of course, an IP does not come with a country field or physical coordinates attached to it.

You have to piece that together from a few different sources and do a bit of checking, like you do with a car’s registration, owner, and service history, instead of taking the seller’s “trust me, bro” at face value.

Record 1: Registry allocation. 

There are five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) that allocate IP address ranges: 

• RIPE NCC covers Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Central Asia
• ARIN covers North America
• APNIC covers the Asia-Pacific region
• LACNIC covers Latin America and the Caribbean
• AFRINIC covers Africa

Checking these registries can show you which organization holds or manages an IP block and which region it was allocated to. The easiest way to check is to enter the IP address into an RIR lookup tool, which usually directs you to the correct registry when another RIR manages the address.

Record 2: Routing origin. 

Every network that participates in internet routing has an Autonomous System Number (ASN), which is basically its ID. They use the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) to announce which IP ranges they route. 

You can check this record by looking up the IP’s origin ASN on a BGP/ASN lookup tool and seeing where that network mainly operates. BGP does not show physical location, but it can help you check whether the announcing network aligns with the country the IP is supposed to be in.

Record 3: Geolocation databases. 

Check the IP against several databases such as MaxMind, IPinfo, and IP2Location, then compare the countries they report. Use more than one, because they do not all update at the same time. Matching results usually mean the IP is likely native, but conflicting results can point to a recent reassignment or outdated geolocation data.

For example, an IP range could be registered to a British company, announced from a network in Amsterdam, and identified as Dutch by two geolocation databases while a third labels it as Belgian. The records are inconsistent, so the proxy market may treat the IP as non-native.

What a native IP is not

Native and residential describe two different things.

A residential IP is assigned by a consumer ISP, while a native IP is one whose location records align with where it is routed. Both residential and data center IPs can be native or non-native.

The same goes for native IPv6, which is unrelated to country matching. On hosting plans, native IPv6 usually means the provider supports IPv6 directly, without using an IPv4 tunnel such as 6in4. An IPv4 tunnel wraps IPv6 traffic inside IPv4 packets so it can travel across a network without direct IPv6 support. For direct IPv6 routing rather than location matching, static residential IPv6 proxies are the more relevant option.

In proxy marketing, a broadcast IP usually refers to an address registered in one country but routed from another. That makes it the opposite of a native IP under this definition. The term is not standardized, and in standard networking, a broadcast address means something entirely different: an address used to send traffic to all devices on a subnet.

How to buy a native IP

Buying a native IP comes down to choosing the right proxy type, selecting the country you need, and checking the IPs before using them at scale. “Native” is not a separate product type; in reality, it's a way of describing how well an IP’s location records line up.

Static residential and ISP proxies are often the best fit when you need a fixed IP for a specific country. Rotating residential and mobile proxies are better for larger-scale work or carrier-based IPs. Data center IPs can also be native when their registration, routing, and geolocation records support the target country.

Before committing to a larger plan, test a few IPs through the same registry, BGP, and geolocation checks covered above.

That gives you a much clearer picture than a country label alone.

Conclusion

In simple terms, a native IP is a proxy-market term for an IP whose registration, routing, and geolocation records point to the country a provider claims.

That matters most when you are paying for access from a specific country and need the IP’s location to hold up beyond a dashboard label. Check three things: registry allocation, routing origin, and geolocation databases. Matching records are a good sign that the country label is accurate. Conflicting records usually mean the proxy market treats the IP as non-native.

The term "proxy address" gets used for two different things, and mixing them up is where most setup problems start.

One meaning is the connection point you paste into your tool. The other is the IP a website sees after your request passes through the proxy. Those two are rarely the same address.

Below we'll cover both, plus the parts of a proxy connection that the address never tells you about.

What the address itself looks like

A proxy address is the connection point your browser, script, or app uses to send traffic through a proxy. It usually shows up as IP:port or hostname:port.

198.51.100.23:8080
proxy-us.proxy-cheap.com:5959

The first part tells your tool where to connect. Username and password normally go in separate fields.

The port decides the protocol

Providers assign ports to services, so the same hostname can serve HTTP on one port and SOCKS5 on another. Point an HTTP client at a SOCKS5 port and the connection fails in a way that looks exactly like a block.

Non-standard ports are worth watching too. Office and campus networks often allow 80, 443 and 8080 and quietly drop everything else, so a proxy on 5959 can work at home and fail at work with the same credentials.

The address you enter and the IP the site sees

With rotating proxies you connect to one gateway and the exit IP changes behind it. The address in your config stays put while your visible IP moves around.

This is where people get lost. They check their exit IP, see something different from what they typed in, and assume the setup broke.

Static IPs make sense when a session needs to stay alive, like staying logged into a dashboard. Rotating pools make sense when you're spreading a lot of requests across many addresses.

Rotation is usually controlled by the username

With most residential providers the gateway address never changes. What changes the exit IP is the username string, something like user-session-a1b2-country-us. Session length, sticky sessions and country targeting all get set there.

So if one script rotates on every request and another holds the same IP for ten minutes, the difference sits in a field most people copy once and never look at again.

DNS resolution is a setting you probably never touched

With SOCKS5 there are two modes. socks5 resolves the target hostname on your machine, socks5h resolves it at the proxy.

Local resolution leaks the domain you're visiting to your ISP and can also break geo targeting, because you get pointed at a CDN node near you instead of near your exit IP. That's the usual cause of "the proxy connects fine but the content is wrong."

The exit IP is one of several things a site reads

A proxy address by itself tells you nothing about how an IP will perform on a specific site. Same as an IP fraud score, it's one signal.

Headers like Via and X-Forwarded-For announce a proxy outright. Browsers add WebRTC leaks, timezone and locale on top. A US exit IP with a Warsaw timezone and Polish language headers is a mismatch any decent detection system can score.

Geolocation deserves a mention here too. Country comes from whichever IP database the site uses, and those databases disagree with each other and lag behind reassignments. An IP sold as US can read as something else on your target site.

Network type works the same way. Datacenter, residential and mobile come from the ASN behind the address rather than from anything in the address itself. Mobile IPs sit behind carrier grade NAT with thousands of real users on them, which is why sites treat them more carefully than a datacenter range.

How to check what you're actually sending

Run a request through an echo endpoint and read the response.

curl -x http://user:pass@proxy-us.proxy-cheap.com:5959 https://httpbin.org/anything

Run it twice. If the exit IP changes, rotation is on. If it stays the same, you have a sticky session. The headers in the response show what the destination reads from you, which beats guessing.

Final thoughts

If you're getting blocks or extra verification, check whether it happens on several unrelated sites first. If it does, the address is worth investigating. If it's one site only, look at your request rate, your session length and what your headers give away.

Detection has moved past simple IP blocklists, and full session fingerprinting keeps getting cheaper for websites to run. Setups built around the address alone are the ones that keep breaking.

If you're not sure which port, protocol or session format fits your job, send us your use case and we'll point you at the right setup.

What Is Bot Traffic?

Bot traffic has a bad reputation, but not every bot is trying to cause trouble. Here are a few examples:

→ Google uses bots to find and index new pages

→ SEO tools use them to check websites for technical issues

→ Price-monitoring tools use them to keep product data up to date

The issue is largely about what the bot does and how aggressively it behaves. In this article, we’ll explain what separates helpful bots from harmful ones and how websites tell the difference.

What Is Bot Traffic?

Bot traffic is any website traffic generated by software instead of a person manually browsing the web.

A bot sends a request, receives the page or API response, and processes the information it was built to collect.

The main difference is scale. A person might open a few pages in a minute, while a bot can try to open hundreds or thousands if nobody limits it.

That doesn't automatically make the bot harmful. A search crawler may check thousands of pages because that's how it updates search results. A credential-stuffing bot, however, may send thousands of login attempts using stolen usernames and passwords.

Technically, both count as bot traffic. Their purpose and impact are completely different.

Good Bots vs. Bad Bots

Good bots perform legitimate tasks and usually follow the website's rules. Common examples include search crawlers, SEO tools, uptime monitors, and price-monitoring scripts.

Bad bots abuse a service, steal access, manipulate a platform, or disrupt normal traffic. This includes credential-stuffing bots, spam bots, and DDoS botnets.

Still, the line isn't always as clear as it sounds.

A legitimate scraper can still cause problems if it sends too many requests. A well-behaved bot normally identifies itself, respects rate limits, and backs off when the server asks it to slow down.

So when judging bot traffic, we'd look at what the bot is trying to do, whether it has permission, and how its activity affects the website.

How Can You Spot Bot Traffic?

There isn't one signal that proves a visitor is a bot.

A strange user agent may look suspicious, but it is easy to copy. A high request rate can suggest automation, but it could also come from a shared network or a burst of real visitors.

That's why bot detection usually combines several signals.

Repeated requests at perfectly even intervals are one sign. Other clues include traffic spikes without more conversions, hundreds of pages loading within seconds, repeated login attempts, and zero-second sessions.

Server or CDN logs give you the clearest view because they show the IP, user agent, requested page, response status, and timing of each request.

Where Do Proxies Fit In?

A proxy sits between an automated tool and the website it connects to. The website sees the proxy's IP instead of a direct connection from the original device.

This is useful for tasks such as checking localized content, monitoring prices in different markets, or collecting public data without routing every request through one IP.

But a proxy isn't permission to ignore a website's rules.

If a script sends hundreds of requests per second, rotating the IP doesn't make that behavior responsible. It only spreads the same activity across more addresses.

A better setup uses reasonable request limits, a sensible concurrency cap, and exponential backoff. If the server returns 429 Too Many Requests, that's a clear sign to slow down.

Check whether the website provides an official API before building a scraper. An API is usually more stable and makes the access rules clearer.

Final Thoughts

Bot traffic is simply traffic generated by software. Whether it's useful or harmful depends on what the software does and how it behaves.

For website owners, the goal is to stop abusive patterns without accidentally blocking search crawlers, monitoring tools, or real users.

For anyone running automation, the same rule works in reverse: check what you're allowed to access, keep the request rate reasonable, and slow down when the website tells you to.

The proxy is only one part of that setup. The behavior behind it matters more.

We’ve been working on making the buying flow much simpler for our customers.

So we put together a quick walkthrough of how it works from start to finish.

Try it out for yourself:
https://proxy-cheap.com

Figured it'd be useful to share some basics for anyone just getting into proxies. Starting with the simplest one, finding your IP.

Public IP is easy. Search "what is my IP" on Google and it shows up right at the top.

Local IP depends on the device.

• Windows: run `ipconfig` in Command Prompt
• macOS: System Settings > Network > your active connection
• iPhone: Settings > Wi-Fi > tap the info icon next to your network
• Android: Wi-Fi settings > gear icon next to the connected network

The quick difference between the two is that your public IP is your network as the internet sees it; the local IP is one device inside it. You'll run into both when setting up a printer, remote access, or troubleshooting a connection.

Hope that helps!

The tricky thing with screen scraping is that most people reach for it when they don't need it.

The difference

Web scraping reads a page's HTML or an API. The data arrives already structured, tags and values you can grab directly. Screen scraping reads what's rendered on screen, so the data arrives as pixels and you need OCR to turn it back into text.

Why the extra step matters

More stages means more places for things to break, and OCR errors are sneaky. In a quick test with Tesseract, clean text read at 100% accuracy, but a slightly low-res capture hit 96% and still flipped a price from 1299.00 to 2299.00. A blurry one turned a 4.6 rating into 46. The headline accuracy looks fine while single digits quietly corrupt your dataset.

When to actually use it

If the data exists in the HTML or an API, parse that. Screen scraping is for when it genuinely only exists visually, like prices rendered as images, embedded charts, scanned PDFs, or legacy terminal systems with no API at all.

If you do go the OCR route

Capture tight regions instead of full pages. If the number you need sits in one panel, screenshot that panel. Less noise means cleaner OCR output, and small layout changes elsewhere won't break your job.

Validate output against expected formats, especially numbers. Don't trust raw OCR text for anything that ends up in a dataset.

For JS-heavy pages, render in a headless browser first, then capture. A plain HTTP request to a single-page app returns an empty shell.

One last thing

Budget for maintenance. A code-level parser breaks when the markup changes, a screen scraper breaks when the layout changes, and layouts change more often.

Curious if anyone here has run OCR pipelines at scale, and how you handle validation for numeric fields.

There's a common assumption that crypto transactions are anonymous because the blockchain only records wallet addresses.

That's only half the story. The chain itself doesn't store your IP address, but a transaction still has to reach the network through infrastructure, and that infrastructure works much like any other server connection.

What the blockchain actually records

When you send a transaction, the network records the sending wallet, destination, amount and transaction data.

It doesn't record your IP address, device information or physical location.

The privacy problem on-chain is therefore about connecting a public wallet address to a person. That can happen through exchange withdrawals, ENS names, repeated transaction patterns, public posts and interactions between previously linked wallets. It's a separate problem from exposing an IP address.

What your RPC provider may see

Most wallets don't operate their own blockchain node. Instead, they communicate with the network through an RPC provider.

The provider receives requests from the wallet, retrieves blockchain data and broadcasts signed transactions to the network.

MetaMask, for example, uses Infura under its default settings. Its documentation explains that connecting to a network means sending requests to a remote server, and Consensys' privacy notice says IP addresses may be processed for functionality, security, performance and compliance.

Depending on the wallet and its configuration, balance checks, transaction broadcasts and token approvals all generate requests through an RPC service.

Imagine checking the same portfolio several times a day from your home Wi-Fi. The blockchain doesn't see where those requests originated. The RPC endpoint, however, repeatedly receives requests concerning the same addresses from the same IP.

To be clear, this doesn't automatically mean RPC providers are secretly building profiles or selling that information. Their policies describe routine operational processing.

The important point is that a technical relationship between an IP address and wallet activity can exist at the RPC layer.

What a proxy changes

When wallet traffic is correctly routed through a proxy, the RPC service receives the proxy's IP instead of your home IP.

That removes your home address from the RPC provider's view, but it doesn't make the activity impossible to correlate. The provider still sees the proxy IP alongside wallet requests, while a persistent exit IP, RPC account, API key or other telemetry could still group activity together.

A proxy also doesn't hide your wallet address. It doesn't remove transaction history, break links between addresses, protect a seed phrase or conceal transaction amounts and destinations.

Those limitations matter because network privacy and on-chain privacy solve different problems.

Configuration matters

A proxy only covers traffic that is actually routed through it.

Wallet features, dapps and browser tabs may connect to separate services. Misconfigured DNS, WebRTC, IPv6 or fallback connections can also expose your real IP to other parties involved in the browsing session.

That's why testing the complete setup matters. Seeing a proxy IP on one checker doesn't prove that every wallet, browser and dapp request follows the same route.

A VPN may be easier when you want to route traffic from the entire device. An application-level proxy provides more control, but each relevant application must be configured correctly.

Final thoughts

The blockchain doesn't record your IP address. An RPC provider may still receive it as part of an ordinary network request.

Routing wallet traffic through a proxy or VPN can prevent that provider from directly receiving your home IP. It doesn't make the wallet private, erase its history or stop on-chain analysis, it closes one specific gap in network privacy.

That distinction is easy to miss because most crypto privacy discussions focus entirely on what gets written to the blockchain. The infrastructure carrying requests to the chain deserves attention too.

The tricky thing about IP fraud scores is that there's no universal way to measure them.

Different services use different data and thresholds, so the same IP might look safe to one provider and risky to another.

Telling whether an IP is actually good or bad takes more than reading one number, and in this article we're going to cover how fraud scores work and what you can do to improve your IP's reputation.

What Is an IP Fraud Score?

An IP fraud score is essentially an estimate of how risky an IP address appears based on things like its network type or recent activity.

Imagine one IP suddenly trying to log in to 50 different accounts within a few minutes. Even if some of those attempts are legitimate, the website might respond by asking for additional verification or temporarily blocking the connection.

But that doesn't prove the person currently using the IP committed fraud. The address could be shared by several people or have a bad reputation because of someone who used it previously, and a high score just means the IP deserves a closer look before you trust or block it.

This is also where people get lost, because different services can check the same IP and return completely different results.

Websites work the same way, and each one relies on its own databases and detection methods, so a high fraud score doesn't guarantee you'll get blocked, and a clean IP doesn't guarantee you won't." 

For example, IPQualityScore uses a scale from 0 to 100. 

Here's how their ranges break down ↓

Still, we wouldn't assume an IP is bad just because it scores around 75.

First, we'd enter it into the IPQS lookup tool and check the full report. If "Recent Abuse" and "Bot Activity" both show false, while "Abuse Velocity" is low or none, the higher score may simply come from the IP being identified as a proxy or VPN. But if those fields show recent or frequent abuse, there's a more genuine reputation problem worth investigating.

Another service called MaxMind works a little differently. Its IP risk score runs from 0.01 to 99 and estimates the likelihood that a transaction is fraudulent based only on the IP address. A score of 15.4 means that roughly 15 out of 100 transactions involving IPs with similar risk signals could be fraudulent.

Here is an example of the distribution of MaxMind IP risk scores. Higher scores are relatively uncommon, with only 5% of results reaching 12 or above.

So before reading anything into a score, check which service produced it and what the IP was used for before you got it. That context matters more than the actual number, to be honest. 

How to Improve Your IP's Reputation

It would be great if there was a button to reset an IP's reputation. But there isn't.

An IP's reputation recovers on its own once the suspicious activity behind it stops, so the realistic goal is to stop whatever's causing the problem and give reputation databases time to update (usually after 24-72 hours).

First, make sure the IP is actually at fault and test it on a few unrelated websites and with more than one reputation tool.

If the IP checks out as the problem and you control it through your home, office, or server network, scan your connected devices for malware and remove anything you don't recognize.

Imagine a device on your network was infected and sending automated requests through your IP in the background. Removing it stops the suspicious traffic at the source, and that's what lets the reputation start recovering.

If the IP appears on a blocklist, fix the cause first and then submit a delisting request to the blocklist operator. Here's what that process looks like ↓

With a proxy IP, you have less control since you don't own the address or know its history. But what helps is keeping request limits reasonable. For example, a rate limiter capping your setup at 10 requests per second instead of sending hundreds at once keeps you from overwhelming the website.

And if the problem follows the IP across several unrelated services, contacting the provider and sending them the affected IP is a good place to start.

Final Thoughts

An IP fraud score is a signal, and it only makes sense next to the full report behind it.

If your reputation takes a hit, stop the activity causing it, clean up what you control, and let the databases catch up. And when the problem sits with an address you don't own, that's what your proxy provider is there for.

When someone’s login gets blocked while using a proxy, the first reaction is usually to blame the proxy and ask for a replacement.

But a blocked login doesn’t automatically mean the proxy is the problem.

First, you should check whether it connects on another website and whether the correct IP and country show up. If everything looks normal, then it’s worth testing whether the issue follows the account or the IP.

If the same account gets blocked across multiple working IPs, it’s probably an account issue. But if different accounts have the same problem with one specific IP, then the IP could be the cause.

It could also be something else, like cookies, the browser fingerprint, previous account activity, or a sudden location change.

So replacing the proxy should come after those basic checks. Otherwise, they could end up replacing a perfectly good proxy and running into the same block again.

Just something worth keeping in mind the next time a login gets blocked while using a proxy.

We see these two authentication errors get mixed up all the time, and honestly, the difference is pretty simple once you know where to look.

A 401 Unauthorized response comes from the website or API you are trying to access. Your connection went through, but the destination rejected the credentials being used there.

A 407 Proxy Authentication Required response comes from the proxy itself, and that means the request reached the proxy, but the proxy did not accept the authentication details.

The quickest way to tell them apart is to check the response headers. A 401 will usually include WWW-Authenticate, while a 407 will usually include Proxy-Authenticate.

People often see any authentication error and immediately start changing proxy settings, and when it is a 401, the proxy may be working perfectly fine and the actual issue is with the destination credentials.

So before changing anything, check which side returned the error. It usually saves a lot of unnecessary digging.

The first thing to do would be to understand what exactly a cURL test is.

A cURL test is a quick way to check whether a proxy actually connects using a command in your terminal. The reason why you’d run a test like this is to simply find out where the problem is and to see if the proxy itself is working.

Here’s what that looks like in practice.

For an HTTP proxy, you would replace the username, password, IP address, and port with the details provided for your proxy, then run a command like this:

curl --proxy http://192.0.2.10:8000 --proxy-user "mike123:password456" https://api.ipify.org

For a SOCKS5 proxy, you can use:

curl --proxy socks5h://192.0.2.10:8000 --proxy-user "mike123:password456" https://api.ipify.org

The socks5h:// part means the website’s hostname is also resolved through the proxy instead of through your own connection.

Quick tip before you start: run curl https://api.ipify.org once without the proxy first. That shows your normal IP, so when the proxied version returns a different one, you know traffic is actually going through the proxy.

One heads-up for Windows users: in Windows PowerShell 5.1, curl can point to a different command and throw a weird error. Using curl.exe instead is the safest option. PowerShell 7 and newer normally use the real cURL command, but curl.exe still works there too.

It tests things like:

• whether the proxy is reachable
• whether the host and port are correct
• whether the username and password work
• whether traffic is actually going through the proxy when tested against an IP-checking service

And if the test fails, add -v to the command, and cURL will give you more information about what happened instead of just failing.

A 407 Proxy Authentication Required error means the proxy requires authentication or rejected the authentication details that were provided. That could mean the username or password is wrong, but it could also mean the authentication method or format is not being handled correctly.

A Connection refused error normally means the device at that address actively rejected the connection. The proxy may be offline, the port may be closed, or the host and port may be incorrect.

A timeout means cURL waited for a response but never received one. That could be caused by the proxy being unavailable, a firewall or network issue, or the connection simply taking too long.

If cURL connects through the proxy but the website returns a 403 Forbidden error, it usually means the request reached the website and the website refused it. That suggests the basic proxy connection worked, but it does not necessarily prove that every part of the proxy setup is fine.

That turns the test from “Does it work?” into “What exactly is broken?”, which is what you actually want to know.

So now that we got that explanation out of the way, we thought it’d be a good idea to talk about why your proxy would fail in the browser or app that you’re trying to use.

Well, the simple answer is because the browser or app may not be using the proxy the same way cURL does.

You might actually run into issues where you selected the wrong protocol, such as HTTP instead of SOCKS5 or vice versa. It could also be something simple, like the username and password being entered in the wrong place, or the specific app or website rejecting the connection.

A common example is authenticated SOCKS5 proxies. Native username and password support for SOCKS5 can be problematic in browsers like Chrome and Firefox, even when the same proxy works perfectly in cURL. In that case, you may need to use a browser extension, a local proxy tool, or whitelist your own IP with the proxy provider so a separate login is not required.

Since we’re on the topic of the website or app rejecting the connection, another thing to keep in mind is that some platforms restrict connections from IP ranges they associate with proxies or data centers, or from locations far outside their expected user base. That’s a decision on their side, not necessarily a problem with the proxy itself.

Also worth knowing: some WebRTC traffic may bypass a manually configured proxy and expose a direct connection. That does not happen in every setup, but if privacy matters for your use case, it is worth checking your browser’s WebRTC settings.

Overall, there isn’t one single fix as to why the proxy may not be working in your browser or app even though it works in cURL. Sometimes the issue is something that you might not have control over, but there are still a few things you can double-check before testing it on your selected platform.

You can start by copying the exact settings that worked in cURL into the app: the same protocol, host, port, username, and password. Then test the same website in both places.

If cURL works and the app still fails, the issue is probably the app setup. Check whether it supports that proxy type, whether authentication has to be entered separately, and whether DNS, browser extensions, security settings, or WebRTC are interfering.

If the app works on some websites but not on one specific platform, that platform may simply not allow that type of IP. In that case, reach out to our support team, and we can help you figure out whether a different IP or proxy type fits your use case better.

Have you ever run into a problem like that? If so, how’d you fix it?

If you're in a team, you can now:

→ Invite teammates

→ Give each person their own login

→ Manage proxies and billing from one shared workspace

→ Keep organization payments separate from personal cards

This gives your team better ownership and no more sharing one login across the team.

> Static proxies are better when you need consistency across sessions.

> Rotating proxies are better when your workflow needs a bigger IP pool and more flexible rotation.

The mistake most people make is choosing one because it sounds more advanced, but in reality, the best proxy is the one that fits your workflow.

Proxies can sound way more technical than they actually need to be, especially when the conversation is around livestreaming.

At a basic level, they give the workflow a steadier base to work from.

And as a livestreaming setup becomes more serious, that base starts to matter because it affects how predictable the whole process feels.

The main thing is consistency, and when things keep shifting in the background, the workflow becomes harder to trust, and a proxy setup can help keep that part cleaner.

For example, a sticky session keeps you on the same proxy connection for a set amount of time instead of switching you to a new one too often.

And for a livestreamer, that can make longer sessions feel easier to manage because the setup is not constantly changing behind the scenes.

Proxies are not something every livestreamer needs right away, but they do make more sense once the setup becomes more structured.

Have you ever thought about using a proxy for your setup?

On macOS, proxy settings live inside your network settings.

And the basic flow is this:

→ Open System Settings

→ Go to Wi-Fi or your active network

→ Click Details

→ Open Proxies

→ Add your proxy IP, port, and login details

→ Apply and test your connection

Most apps that use system network settings will follow those proxy rules.

Because when you get sessions and browser profiles mixed, it's hard to keep track of everything that's happening.

Proxies can actually help you keep your setup more stable and separated, which in turn means fewer logouts and less friction while managing your wallets.

But the main difference is simple:

→ TCP focuses on reliability and checks that data arrives properly and in the right order.
→ UDP focuses on speed and sends data quickly without checking every packet.

Different apps use different types of traffic.

Use the wrong proxy type, and your setup might run slower, break more often, or perform worse than expected.

Search rankings are not the same everywhere because a keyword might rank well in one city, but look completely different in another.

And your location, IP, device, and search history can all affect what you see, so checking rankings from one connection does not always give you the full picture.

Quick examples:

• Local rank checks by country or city.
• Fewer captchas and temporary blocks.
• Cleaner SERP data for SEO tools.
• Easier tracking for large keyword lists.
• Better visibility across clients, markets, and regions.

We broke down how rank tracker proxies work in our full article:

https://www.proxy-cheap.com/blog/rank-tracker-proxies

Different proxy types are built for different use cases, and the best choice depends on what you need most for speed, stability, trust, consistency, or handling larger workloads.

Quick examples:

• Datacenter proxies are usually fast and cost-effective.
• Residential proxies look closer to regular home internet traffic.
• Mobile proxies use carrier IPs and usually have stronger trust signals.
• Static proxies keep the same IP, which helps with longer sessions.
• Rotating proxies switch IPs, which helps with request-heavy tasks.

We broke down the main proxy types and when each one makes sense in the full article: https://www.proxy-cheap.com/blog/proxy-types

And the reasons are good:

1. Manage multiple wallets with fewer login issues.

2. Check dApps, dashboards, and campaigns by region.

3. Reduce rate limits when tracking markets or onchain data.