What's the bigggest downside of using proxies?

Slowness, dead IPs, disconnection issues, blocked addresses...
there's a lot of things that can go wrong. What problem did you have the most issues with on your own,
and did you find a good solution?

The biggest issue for me would be selecting clean IPs, especially for accounts where longevity matters, when you log in using an IP that has prior (ab)use it instantly flags & burns the account.

They suck sometimes with connection and slow. They also may be used by idiots looking up who knows what. Like what is Tor legitimately used for? Little because of the user's intent. That traffic is suspect probably by ISP. One guy years back on Totse (when the internet was still Wild West) put up a node for Tor and they had all kinds of crazy requests.

I’d say consistency is probably the biggest one. A proxy can be fast, but if it randomly drops or gets blocked, the speed doesn’t matter much.

The practical fix is to monitor the pool instead of treating every proxy as equally healthy. Track success rate, connection time and errors per endpoint, then temporarily remove the bad ones and retry through another healthy endpoint

That also makes debugging a lot easier because you can tell whether the failure came from the proxy, the target site or your own code

Biggest downside is really just cost. They eat your profit margin. You can always, always, find good proxies for your needs if cost was not an issue - but the reality is residential etc which is billed per GB is just out of reach for most projects.

Personally I'd say they are expensive for good ones that's the big downside cheap ones are useless if they leak or are not trusted sources. Alot of people use free tier servers to make proxies but they have a bad reputation on social media - but ok for scraping

Money money money!

i think dead or unstable IPs are probably the biggest headache. even when everything else is configured properly, a connection dropping or an IP suddenly becoming unusable can turn into way more maintenance than expected.

slow download speed

Good food for thought. I'd say reliability is probably the biggest one for me. Slowness is annoying, but an IP dropping or constantly changing when you don't want it to can be much more disruptive. Far as solutions go, either the provider helps me cuz I know it's a proxy issue, or I'm changing providers.
That said, it really depends on the use case. A problem that's a dealbreaker for one person might barely matter to someone else.

the biggest issue for me is slow or dead ips a better proxy provider usually fixes most of them

It’s a bit tricky to get an IP that’s clean enough to run accounts for an extended amount of time on. A huge amount of issues arise simply from IPs being flagged due to prior usage.

Dead or already blocked IPs were the biggest headache. Switching to a provider with a larger rotating pool and automatic IP replacement fixed most of it.

sircapalot187 said:

Slowness, dead IPs, disconnection issues, blocked addresses...
there's a lot of things that can go wrong. What problem did you have the most issues with on your own,
and did you find a good solution?

Click to expand...

biggest downside is untruthfull sellers

sircapalot187 said:

Slowness, dead IPs, disconnection issues, blocked addresses...
there's a lot of things that can go wrong. What problem did you have the most issues with on your own,
and did you find a good solution?

Click to expand...

The biggest issue is probably dependency. You depend on the proxy being up and working 24/7 and you put your account(s) into the hands of the proxy seller. If the proxy is low quality, it might burn your account, etc.
You need to make sure to find a trustworthy proxy seller who you can trust and work with longterm.

I have a proxy scraper from GSA, now its 1/4th of its price I paid. Still a good tool.
Mobile Socks, Private Proxies, Socks5 and dedicated proxies are good. Public ones get abused more, I had very few that stayed up long for daily use even years back. Providers lie, sure. Theres generation methods and such to turn mobiles into proxies, though I like to stay within the law.

Socks5/Proxy is one piece of the puzzle if you are trying for anonymity. Really they are the last sleeve of the puzzle on a good anonymous tech stack.
SIM/VPN/Socks

I know of multiple setups for anonymity:

1. SIM/VPN/Sock (Simple enough)
Sim is largely for phone, though easy to buy. Can activate and use. VPN can be paid in BTC, which is easy enough to get. Modem/Router portable or SIM module or laptop. Should be mentioned, dont watch video on Cellular data, it is expensive and will be gone. Then you are throttled. Just use it for reading TXT.
Even phone lines can transmit data like over dial up, so if you think of it theres other ways too if you are phone savvy and like risk, I wont reveal everything though.

2. VPN>VM+VPN>VPS/Sock (Exploit forum technique)
Something like this I hear of on forum. This setup is supposed to prevent origin IP though seems bulky.

3. VPN/VPN/Sock/Sock++ (Multi Layer - Slow)
Old technique, people used to brag of 7 layers of protection. Good for slow setups, though if on your real IP still (origin) then good luck.

4. Public Wifi / or Wardriver stuff* (WEP old / WPA new standard = hard to crack for even h4ck3r)
McDonalds even has pub wifi, many places have it on public password.

Proxifier I tested, it allows rotation of proxy, once one drops it uses the next. Handy tool with even emulators.
Web proxies suck. I just told you setups, use them for good only.
Oh yeah theres the whole world of RDPs if you buy, those though are not legit. VPS is legit, can get Ukrainian VPS or something for crypto too.

Tor, I wouldnt use it. Too many fraudsters and filth on that dark net. Look into it if you like, its P2P network of nodes. Slow though can be about totally anonymous with bootable OS linux stick and a Tor bridge. Onion sites have like scrambled domains, youd know if you ever saw one. I would say just stay off that crap. Its all scum trying to rip off your money, theres no deals on there for the most part. They will try to part you with your money with fake listings on platforms or other scams.

yeah biggest pain for me is dead ips and sudden blocks but i try to switched to sticky residential proxies and rotate less often way more stable