Why proxies are mandatory for serious scraping
A scraper without proxies has just one IP address. Send 100 requests in a minute and the target's rate limiter notices. Do it again and that IP gets flagged. Do it a third time and the IP lands on a permanent block list — and since it's your home or office connection, your normal browsing now suffers too. Proxies solve all of this. Your real IP never reaches the target, requests spread across hundreds or thousands of IPs, and a single flagged IP is just one to drop from the pool. At any serious volume, proxies aren't optional — they're how scraping is built.
Choosing the right proxy type
There are four common types, trading off cost, speed, and how easy they are to detect:
- Datacenter proxies ($0.50–$2/GB) are cheapest and fastest, but easiest to spot — their IPs belong to cloud providers like AWS, OVH, and DigitalOcean, and anti-bot vendors have those network ranges (ASNs — the ID number that groups a provider's IPs) memorized. Fine for unprotected sites and APIs that don't care.
- Residential proxies ($3–$15/GB) route through real home internet connections. Slower and pricier, but they carry the trust of an ordinary consumer. Use them on sites that block datacenter IPs.
- Mobile proxies (4G/5G, $10–$50/GB) are the most expensive and hardest to block. Mobile carriers route thousands of users behind one shared IP (NAT — many devices sharing a single public address), so blocking that IP would also block real customers.
- ISP proxies give datacenter speed with residential-style IPs — handy for high-throughput work against medium-difficulty sites.
How to integrate proxies into a scraper
Most providers give you a single gateway address with a username and password. In Python's requests library: proxies={'http': 'http://user:pass@gw:port', 'https': 'http://user:pass@gw:port'}. In Playwright: pass a proxy option to launch() or per context. To keep the same outbound IP for a whole session (a "sticky session"), you usually encode it in the username — user-session-abc123:pass holds you on one IP until the session ends. For production, wrap all this in a retry layer that detects blocks, retires bad IPs, and reports which IPs succeed against which targets. Without that visibility, you're paying for a pool you can't tune.