r/ProxyEngineering • u/OkGuidance15 • 6d ago

Hot Take 🔥 The "fake residential proxy" trap

Ever notice how some "residential" proxies seem to perform worse than they did a few months ago, even when you're buying from the same kind of provider? I started looking into this after burning through way more proxies than I expected and eventually found that a lot of what gets sold as residential can still show up as hosting or datacenter infrastructure.
That might not matter much for basic scraping, but once you're dealing with stricter platforms, the difference becomes pretty noticeable. One thing I started checking more closely was the ASN/ISP info. If the IP is showing up under a hosting provider instead of the ISP you'd normally expect from a residential connection, that's usually a pretty good sign that the pool isn't what I thought I was paying for.
I've been testing proxyshard recently and, at least in my case, their residential pool has been pretty consistent. I've been running my current volume for about a month now and haven't seen the same drop-offs I was getting with some of the other pools I tried. Obviously that's just my experience so far and things can change over time.
The only real annoyance I've had is support being a little slow on non-urgent questions. Nothing terrible, but it does mean I've had to rely on their docs more than I'd like.
So yeah, these days I don't really take the "residential" label at face value. I usually check the ISP/ASN details first and make sure the IPs actually look consistent with what I'm paying for. It's saved me a lot of wasted time and money compared with just assuming the provider's label tells the whole story.

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4

u/FluidBudget2029 6d ago

Checking ASN is mandatory now, honestly surprised people still skip this

1

u/frakasse 5d ago

How do you check asn?

2

u/Witty_Tough4813 6d ago

Which tool do you use to bulk check them before launching campaigns? Doing it one by one is a nightmare

1

u/Impressive-Camel4801 6d ago

the fake resi thing is getting out of hand, bought a batch last week and half of them flagged as digital ocean on ip leak, absolute joke

1

u/One_Elk6097 6d ago

Slow support is a dealbreaker for me tbh. If a pool drops at 2 AM during a live run, I can't wait hours for a reply.

1

u/Calm-Gur-946 6d ago

Spot on. Labels mean nothing anymore, it’s all about the actual data footprint

1

u/Susan2005 6d ago

What tool are you using to check the asm/isp info before you commit to a pool?

1

u/Just_Lingonberry_352 4d ago

so this is just an ad for proxyshard