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Quick start

Avoid blocks responsibly

Practical, fair habits that keep requests succeeding without abusing the sites you read.

This guide is part of the ProxyOnly quick-start series. It assumes nothing and takes a few minutes. Prices are live, and you can start with a balance of one US dollar in any of the 63 countries we stock.

Guide
Avoid blocks responsibly
Series
13 quick-start guides
Minimum balance
US$1

What a block usually means

A block is a site telling you that your traffic looks unwelcome. The reasons are usually simple: too many requests too fast from one address, requests with no browser-like headers, behaviour no person would show, or an address range that the site does not accept at all. A different proxy fixes only the last one.

Treat a block as feedback. Slow down first, and change addresses second.

Habits that help

These steps apply whichever type of proxy you use.

  1. Limit concurrency per site. A few parallel requests are normal, hundreds are not.
  2. Add pauses with a little randomness, and slow down further when you see errors.
  3. Send realistic headers, including a current browser user agent and an accept-language that fits your exit country.
  4. Keep cookies for the length of a session, and drop them when you change the address.
  5. Respect robots rules and the site's terms, and avoid pages that need a login that is not yours.
  6. Cache what you already have so that you do not request the same page twice.

Choosing addresses with care

Match the country to the audience of the site. A local retail site expects local visitors, and a visit from a far country is both slower and more suspicious. Use sticky sessions for any journey that spans several pages, and rotation for independent pages. For strict sites, an ISP proxy often succeeds where a datacenter address does not, and it is cheaper than mobile.

What we do not help with

Proxies are for lawful work: reading public pages, checking your own sites and ads, testing your own products and researching markets. They are not for getting into accounts that are not yours, for fraud, for spam or for overloading a site. Our acceptable use policy applies to every order, and we may suspend an account that breaks it.

Which proxy type fits any country

The right type depends on how strict the destination is, how much traffic you will send and how long you need the address. A short comparison of the types we sell:

Datacenter IPv4. The default choice for most jobs. These are dedicated IPv4 addresses hosted in a datacenter, fast and inexpensive, and the best fit for high-volume reading of public pages, monitoring and automation. Some websites treat datacenter ranges more cautiously than consumer connections, so test your target before you commit to a long rental.

ISP proxies. Static addresses that are registered to an internet service provider rather than a hosting company. They keep the speed of datacenter hardware and look more like an ordinary home or office connection, which helps with destinations that are strict about hosting ranges.

Shared IPv4. A shared address is used by more than one customer and costs less. It suits light tasks, quick checks and testing where a clean, exclusive address is not essential.

IPv6. IPv6 addresses are very cheap and plentiful, and they work well with destinations that serve IPv6 traffic, such as many large search, video and social platforms. Many smaller sites are still IPv4 only, so check that your target supports IPv6 before you buy.

Mobile proxies. Addresses from mobile carrier networks. Many phones share the same carrier address, so websites tend to be tolerant of this traffic, which makes mobile proxies the right choice for testing mobile ads, apps and landing pages. They cost more than datacenter addresses.

Residential proxies. Addresses from home internet connections, billed by the amount of traffic you use and not by the IP. They suit light, bursty jobs on sites that block datacenter and ISP ranges. Heavy traffic gets expensive quickly, so estimate your monthly volume first.

If you are unsure, rent one address of the type you think you need, run your real task against it for a day, and look at the success rate. Because rental periods start at a few days, trying a type costs very little.

Using proxies responsibly in any country

A proxy is a networking tool and it is lawful in most places, but what you do with it still has to be lawful and fair. Follow the laws that apply to you and to the place you send traffic to, read the terms of the sites you visit, honour robots rules and rate limits, and never use an address to access accounts or data that are not yours. ProxyOnly cannot give legal advice, and our acceptable use policy applies to every order.

In practice that means reading public pages, checking your own sites and ads, and testing your own products. If a task would be unwelcome to the site owner when done by hand, it is unwelcome when done through a proxy too.

Frequently asked questions

Why was I blocked?

Usually too many requests too fast, missing headers, or an address range the site does not accept. Slow down first.

Will a different proxy type fix blocks?

Only if the cause is the address range. If the cause is behaviour, no proxy type will help.

Is scraping allowed?

Reading public pages is common, but you must follow the law and the site's terms, and our acceptable use policy applies.

How many requests per second is safe?

It depends on the site. Start low, watch the error rate, and raise slowly.

Ready to try it?

Create an account, add funds from US$1 and pick your country and proxy type.