proxy glossary
27 terms you meet when buying or running proxies, defined plainly. no signup to read them.
terms
asn
autonomous system number, the public id of a network that announces its own blocks of ip addresses on the internet.
bandwidth metering
billing by the gigabytes that pass through the proxy rather than by address or by time.
captcha
a challenge a site interposes to test whether a visitor is human, triggered mostly by ip reputation and client signals rather than by anything you typed.
cidr
the notation for writing a block of ip addresses as a starting address plus a prefix length, like 203.0.113.0/24.
concurrency
how many proxy connections you run at the same time, which sets both your throughput and most of your block risk.
crawling
walking a site by following links to discover urls, as distinct from extracting data out of a page you already have.
datacenter proxy
a proxy on server ips owned by a hosting company: fast and cheap, and easy for a target site to recognise as non residential.
fingerprinting
identifying a client from the combination of properties it exposes, so it can be recognised again even after its ip changes.
geoblocking
refusing or altering service based on the country a visitor's ip address maps to.
geolocation targeting
asking a provider for an exit in a specific country, state, city or network rather than anywhere in the pool.
headless browser
a real browser engine run without a visible window and driven by code, so pages render and javascript executes normally.
http proxy
a proxy that speaks http, forwarding plain requests directly and tunnelling https through the connect method.
ip reputation
a score a site assigns your exit address from its history, network type and current behaviour, used to decide whether to serve, challenge or block you.
ipv6
the 128 bit version of ip addressing, with effectively unlimited addresses, supported by some sites and ignored by others.
isp proxy
a server hosted ip that is registered to a consumer isp, so it looks residential in ip databases while running at datacenter speed.
mobile proxy
a proxy that exits through a phone carrier's network, so your traffic carries a 4g or 5g address shared by many real subscribers.
proxy chaining
routing traffic through two or more proxies in sequence so that no single hop knows both who you are and where you went.
rate limiting
a server rule that caps how many requests a client may make in a time window, then answers with 429 or a block once you cross it.
residential ip pool
the set of real consumer addresses a provider can route you through, and the thing you are actually buying with residential bandwidth.
residential proxy
a proxy that routes your traffic through a real home internet connection, so the destination sees a consumer isp address instead of yours.
reverse proxy
a server that sits in front of a website and answers on its behalf, the opposite direction from the proxy you buy.
rotating proxy
a proxy endpoint that hands you a different exit ip on a schedule or on every request.
socks5
a lightweight tunnelling protocol that forwards raw tcp, and optionally udp, through a proxy without understanding what is inside it.
sticky session
a mode that pins you to one exit ip for a set time or until you change a session id, instead of rotating on every request.
tls fingerprinting
identifying the software behind a connection from the details of its tls handshake, before a single http byte is sent.
user agent
the http header a client sends to describe itself, naming a browser version and operating system.
web scraping
fetching web pages with a program and pulling structured data out of them.