Why proxies are mandatory for serious scraping
A scraper without proxies has one IP address. The first time it sends 100 requests in a minute, the target's rate limiter notices. The second time, the IP gets flagged. The third time, the IP is on a permanent block list and your home or office is now degraded for other purposes. Proxies fix all of that: your real IP never appears to the target, requests spread across hundreds or thousands of IPs, and a single flagged IP is just one to retire from the pool. At any non-trivial volume, proxies aren't optional — they're how scraping is built.
Choosing the right proxy type
Datacenter proxies are cheapest ($0.50–$2/GB), fastest, and most easily detected — their IP ranges belong to AWS, OVH, DigitalOcean, and anti-bot vendors have their ASNs memorized. They work well for unprotected sites and APIs that don't care. Residential proxies ($3–$15/GB) route through real home connections — slower, pricier, but they carry consumer-grade trust. Use them for sites that block datacenter IPs. Mobile proxies (4G/5G, $10–$50/GB) are the most expensive and hardest to block, because mobile carriers NAT thousands of users behind shared IPs — blocking one effectively means blocking real customers. ISP proxies are datacenter speed with residential IP heritage; useful for high-throughput needs against medium-difficulty sites.
How to integrate proxies into a scraper
Most providers expose a single gateway endpoint with username:password auth. In Python's requests: `proxies={'http': 'http://user:pass@gw:port', 'https': 'http://user:pass@gw:port'}`. In Playwright: pass a `proxy` option to `launch()` or per-context. Sticky sessions are usually controlled via the username — `user-session-abc123:pass` keeps you on the same outbound IP for the session duration. For production, wrap this in a retry layer that detects blocks, retires bad IPs, and surfaces metrics about which IPs succeed against which targets. Without that telemetry, you're paying for a pool you can't tune.