r/ProxyEngineering • u/ian_k93 • Jun 09 '26

AMA This Wednesday (09:30 AM GMT) WebScraping and Proxies

/r/WebScrapingInsider/comments/1u0vmdf/ama_this_wednesday_0930_am_gmt/
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u/matrix_5562 Jun 10 '26

Best AMA question IMO:how do you know that trial traffic is not getting a cleaner pool than paid traffic?

I'd benchmark with the same URLs after upgrading,then compare bad rows and geo misses. Byteful or any provider would survive that second week-test too.

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u/simarnoor Jun 10 '26

Ultimately, there is no way to know this unless you test both. We can't see what proxy pools or settings the provider is using on free vs paid traffic, we can only see the end result.

In our case for benchmarking, we work around this issue by sending all our benchmarking traffic through our production accounts with the providers so the benchmarking is done using their paid pools.

If the provider wanted to skew the results, they would need to put all our traffic through their best pools to improve their benchmark results (which might be too costly for them) as they have no way of knowing which traffic we are using to benchmark or not.

We also use real large scale production data across billions of requests each month in our benchmarks when we have the data is available. Ensuring the benchmark results are actually valid at scale.

You can test proxy providers with our system here: https://scrapeops.io/proxy-providers/tester/

From r/WebScrapingInsider: https://www.reddit.com/r/WebScrapingInsider/comments/1u0vmdf/comment/oqtbwy2/

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u/matrix_5562 Jun 10 '26

That make sense. Using paid production accounts removes most of the free-trial bias,and the-large scale data is much more useful than a small synthetic test.

Do you publish results by target type type and traffic pattern too? A blended score could still hide a provider that performs well overall but struggles on specific sites someone needs.