proxy

Proxy Provider

A proxy provider is a commercial service that sells access to a managed pool of IP addresses, handling IP sourcing, rotation, and geo-targeting on behalf of scraping clients.

Building and maintaining a private proxy pool at scale requires sourcing IPs (residential ISP agreements, mobile carrier partnerships, or datacenter allocation), managing IP health (detecting and retiring burned IPs), implementing rotation logic, and providing a stable API for clients to use. Commercial proxy providers handle all of this as a managed service.

Major proxy providers include Bright Data, Oxylabs, Smartproxy, IPRoyal, and Webshare. They differ in pool size (tens of millions vs. hundreds of thousands of IPs), proxy types available (residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP), geo-targeting granularity (country vs. city vs. ASN), and pricing model (per GB vs. per request vs. flat monthly).

For scraping platforms like AlterLab, proxy provider selection directly affects website compatibility capability and cost. Residential and mobile proxies from reputable providers have lower ban rates and higher trust scores with anti-bot systems, but cost 10–50x more per GB than datacenter proxies.

Related Terms

Proxy Pool
A managed collection of proxy IP addresses used to distribute outbound requests across multiple origins and stay below per-IP rate limits.
Residential Proxy
An IP address assigned by an ISP to a real residential device, used to route scraping requests through genuine consumer IPs.
Rotating Proxy
A proxy configuration that automatically assigns a different IP address for each request or at a set interval to prevent IP-based rate limiting.
Mobile Proxy
An IP address from a mobile carrier network (4G/5G), providing the highest trust signals for anti-bot systems due to genuine mobile device attribution.
IP Rotation
The practice of cycling through multiple IP addresses across requests so no single IP triggers rate limits or bans.

Extract Proxy Provider data from any website

AlterLab returns clean, structured data from any public URL — no scraper infrastructure needed. Start free, no credit card required.

View API docs
Back to Glossary

Your first scrape.
Sixty seconds.

$1 free balance. No credit card. No SDK.Just a POST request.

terminal
curl -X POST https://api.alterlab.io/v1/scrape \
-H "X-API-Key: YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown"]}'

No credit card required · Up to 5,000 free scrapes · Balance never expires

    Proxy Provider — Web Scraping Glossary | AlterLab