Proxy fundamentals
Anti-bot system
Software that decides whether a request came from a human, using signals well beyond the IP address.
Proxy fundamentals · proxy.wiki
Proxy fundamentals
ASN
Autonomous System Number — the identifier of the network that owns an IP range, and a primary classification signal.
Proxy fundamentals
Backconnect proxy
A single gateway address that transparently routes each request through a different address in the provider's pool.
Proxy fundamentals
Bandwidth billing
Charging by gigabyte transferred — the standard model for residential proxies, and easy to underestimate.
Proxy fundamentals
Browser fingerprinting
Building an identifier from browser and device characteristics exposed to JavaScript.
Proxy fundamentals
CAPTCHA
A challenge intended to separate humans from automation, and usually a symptom rather than the problem itself.
Proxy fundamentals
Concurrency
How many proxy connections you may run at once — often the real constraint on throughput, not bandwidth.
Proxy fundamentals
Datacenter proxy
A proxy hosted in a commercial datacentre. Fast and inexpensive, but easily identified as non-residential.
Proxy fundamentals
Exit node
The final address in a proxy chain — the one the destination actually sees and records.
Proxy fundamentals
Forward proxy
A proxy that acts for the client. It sits between you and the internet and hides your address from destinations.
Proxy fundamentals
Geo-targeting
Choosing where your proxy exits, from country level down to city or network in some services.
Proxy fundamentals
Headless browser
A real browser engine driven programmatically with no visible window. Powerful, slow and expensive in bandwidth.
Proxy fundamentals
HTTP CONNECT
The HTTP method that asks a proxy to open a raw tunnel, which is how HTTPS travels through an HTTP proxy.
Proxy fundamentals
IP whitelisting
Authorising a proxy by the address you connect from, instead of sending a username and password.
Proxy fundamentals
ISP proxy
A datacentre-hosted address registered to a consumer ISP. Datacentre speed with residential registration, billed per IP.
Proxy fundamentals
Mobile proxy
A proxy exiting through a mobile carrier address, shared by many real handsets via carrier-grade NAT.
Proxy fundamentals
Proxy authentication
How a proxy verifies who you are, and the meaning of the 407 status code defined in RFC 9110.
Proxy fundamentals
Proxy pool
The set of addresses a provider can route your traffic through, and the source of every rotation decision.
Proxy fundamentals
Proxy server
A server that makes requests on your behalf, so the destination sees the proxy's address instead of yours.
Proxy fundamentals
Rate limiting
Capping how many requests a client may make in a period. The 429 status code is defined in RFC 6585.
Proxy fundamentals
Residential proxy
A proxy whose exit address belongs to a consumer ISP, so the traffic appears to come from an ordinary home connection.
Proxy fundamentals
Reverse proxy
A proxy deployed in front of a server. Clients connect to it as if it were the origin, and it forwards to the real…
Proxy fundamentals
robots.txt
A file telling crawlers which paths a site prefers they avoid. A convention, not an access control.
Proxy fundamentals
Rotating proxy
A proxy endpoint that changes the exit address automatically, either on every request or on a timer.
Proxy fundamentals
Rotating vs sticky sessions: choosing how addresses change
When to rotate on every request, when to hold an address, and why rotating too aggressively looks more suspicious.
Proxy fundamentals
SOCKS5
A protocol that proxies any TCP or UDP traffic without inspecting it, defined in RFC 1928.
Proxy fundamentals
Sticky session
A setting that keeps the same exit address for a fixed period, so a multi-step flow appears to come from one user.
Proxy fundamentals
Success rate
The share of requests that return a usable response. Meaningless without a sample size and a named target.
Proxy fundamentals
TLS fingerprinting
Identifying a client from the structure of its TLS handshake, before any HTTP request is sent.
Proxy fundamentals
User agent
The header a client uses to identify itself. Trivially changed, and therefore weak evidence on its own.
Proxy fundamentals
Web scraping
Extracting structured data from web pages automatically. Lawful in many contexts and restricted in others.
Proxy fundamentals
What is a proxy server?
How a proxy actually routes your request, what the destination can still see, and where each of the four types fits.