How to Choose the Best Proxies — 5 Quality Parameters

Without high-quality proxies, it is impossible to effectively engage in multi-accounting, parsing, and traffic arbitrage. They are necessary for bypassing anti-fraud systems, protecting accounts from bans, and anonymous data collection.

However, a high price for proxies does not always guarantee the successful solution of a specific task: even large providers encounter errors that affect the overall digital fingerprint of a profile. On the other hand, with the right approach, you can significantly reduce costs without losing quality — let's analyze the 5 main parameters that directly affect proxy quality and the successful completion of tasks.

5 Quality Parameters: How to Choose Proxies Correctly

When choosing a proxy, it is important to focus on specific quality parameters. Let's break down five key characteristics worth checking before purchasing.

IP Trust: ASN and Network Type

IP Trust is a general parameter demonstrating the level of trust from anti-fraud and anti-bot systems, formed based on a number of technical characteristics of the IP address and its usage history.

The level of trust is primarily influenced by:

• Network Type and ASN — Datacenter IP addresses typically have lower trust and are more likely to face restrictions, whereas residential and mobile networks are considered less risky;
• IP Reputation — The involvement of an address in suspicious activity and its presence in blacklists directly reduces the trust level;
• IP Type — IPv4 and IPv6 differ in that IPv4 is universal but often has a poor reputation due to mass usage, while IPv6 is less common in blacklists but is not supported by all platforms.

Anti-bot systems also use solutions for scoring IP addresses. For independent verification of IP quality, you can use third-party scoring services. One of the most popular options is IPQualityScore.

IPQualityScore allows you to see:

• IP Risk Score from 0 to 100 (the lower the value, the better)
• Flags for bot, crawler, proxy, VPN, and TOR
• Recent abuse status (no — good, yes — bad)
• General IP information: network type, ASN, network owner

This dataset allows you to evaluate the IP as anti-bot systems see it.

The service itself is sometimes integrated into anti-detect browsers, for example, Linken Sphere. More about this in our article.

When evaluating the quality of proxies from a specific service for a selected region, it is important to analyze a whole sample of IPs. The optimal option is to take 5–10 proxies of one GEO, check them through IPQualityScore, record the results in a table, and evaluate the average level of IP cleanliness for the service in the working region. This approach allows you to understand the overall quality of the pool.

ASN, in this context, is just a unique identifier for a group of IP networks, for example, AS201838. The ASN number itself tells the user nothing. To understand which organization or provider the ASN belongs to, it must be deciphered. This can be done through specialized databases, for example, in the IPinfo service. In the search, specify the format AS{ASN digits}. An alternative option is to use IPQualityScore, which automatically decodes the ASN and shows the network owner.

Signs of proxy reliability:

• Most IPs in the pool show a low risk score, without major differences between them
• The IP has no obvious tags indicating it is a proxy, VPN, TOR, or bot
• Recent abuse status is usually absent (meaning the IP has not been noted in problems)
• The IP is not associated with data centers (mobile, residential, or ISP)
• Upon re-checking, the IP shows similar results

In practice, mistakes are often made when choosing proxies.

The most common ones are:

1. Evaluating proxies by a single IP instead of looking at the entire pool
2. Paying attention only to the risk score and skipping other signs
3. Ignoring the ASN and not checking which providers own the IPs
4. Checking proxies without tying them to a specific region

GEO Compliance

GEO compliance is how the actual location of the IP is determined by various services and platforms, and whether it matches the location declared by the proxy service.

To correctly evaluate this parameter, it is necessary to check the IP in several sources at once, since different services and platforms use different GeoIP databases to determine location. Because of this, the same location may be identified differently.

To compare data from several GeoIP databases, you can use the service Check-host.

It is normal if the IP is identified as the same country in different GeoIP databases, even if the city or region differs. If the same IP is identified as different countries, such a proxy can create problems during work.

Common mistakes:

1. Checking the IP in one source and considering the result final.
2. Ignoring significant discrepancies between GeoIP databases.
3. Using proxies with floating GEO in tasks where the region is critical.

Stability: Uptime and Connection Speed

Connection speed determines how quickly pages load, requests are executed, and actions are processed. Low speed directly affects:

• Increased page loading time
• Growth of errors and timeouts
• Unstable operation of automation and scraping

You can check this indicator in the Speedtest service. It allows you to quickly evaluate download speed, latency, and overall connection quality.

Besides speed, it is important to consider proxy uptime — that is, how stably it works. Even a fast proxy is useless if the connection drops regularly or the IP is periodically unavailable.

Uptime cannot be correctly evaluated in advance by tests or service promises. This parameter is checked only in practice — during real work with accounts, bots, or scraping.

Common mistakes when evaluating stability: focusing only on speed, ignoring connection drops, and drawing conclusions from short tests instead of real load.

Rotation

Rotation is the mechanism of changing the IP address in dynamic proxies. It can be performed automatically by time or by user request via a special link or API.

Rotation is especially important for:

• Scraping
• Mass actions
• Working with a large number of requests
• Automation

If a proxy service offers IP change by link or via API, this functionality must be checked. After sending a request to change the IP, the address should change immediately or with minimal delay. If the IP does not change or updates only after a few minutes, such rotation is considered poor.

It is also important to check automatic rotation, the time intervals of which are usually set in the personal account. You need to make sure that the IP actually changes with the specified periodicity.

It is worth paying attention to whether the same IPs repeat too often when changing addresses. To do this, perform rotation at least 10 times, constantly recording new addresses.

To check the current address, you can use the service 2ip.io.

Support and Usability

Support is a basic parameter of any proxy service, which directly affects comfort and speed of work. Even with good IP quality, questions may arise during the process regarding setup, rotation, address replacement, or working with specific services.

It is better to make sure in advance that support responds promptly and to the point. If operators limit themselves to formal answers or react slowly to requests, any problems with proxies will be solved slowly and create inconvenience in work.

Additionally, it is worth paying attention to the convenience of the personal account (dashboard), the availability of documentation, and clear instructions.

How to Check Proxies Before Buying

Before buying proxies, it is important to conduct a basic check, which allows you to immediately filter out problematic services. Below is a simple checklist that can be used to evaluate proxies for any task.

Proxy Pre-Purchase Checklist

1. Check ASN and network type. Ensure that the IP does not belong to data centers, determine the network type, and see which provider owns the ASN. This will help understand if the proxy is suitable for tasks involving anti-fraud.

2. Check GEO. Check the IP in several GeoIP databases and ensure that the country is determined correctly. It is important that the country matches in the GEO results, even if the city or region differs.

3. Run speed, ping, and packet loss tests. Check connection speed, latency, and proxy stability. It is necessary to see how quickly pages load and if there are delays or connection drops.

4. Test rotation. Check how the IP change works: by link, via API, or automatically. The IP should change quickly, without delays and frequent repetitions of the same addresses.

5. Evaluate captchas and blocks. Open 2–3 target sites you plan to work with and evaluate how often captchas, restrictions, or errors appear. This allows you to understand how the proxy behaves in real conditions, not just in tests.

Such a checklist allows you to understand the quality of proxies in advance and avoid buying an unsuitable pool.

Important! We recommend checking proxies through a trial period or a minimal purchase.

How to Choose Proxies for a Task

Different tasks require different proxies. What works in one case may not fit in another, so first define the task, and only then compare options by price.

In tasks with rigid anti-fraud (multi-accounting and working with ad cabinets, farming), IP trust, network type, and ASN reputation are primarily important. Proxies should look like ordinary user connections and work stably in the selected GEO. High speed in such scenarios is not critical.

In scraping and automation tasks, connection speed, uptime, and correct IP rotation come to the fore. The type of proxy is chosen taking into account how strictly the target site reacts to requests: for simple sites, faster options will do; for resources with strong protection — proxies with a higher reputation, even if they work slower and cost more.

Frequent Mistakes When Choosing Proxies

The most common mistake is choosing proxies by price or speed, without considering other factors. Fast proxies may perform well in tests but catch captchas and restrictions when working with anti-fraud. Price and speed alone say nothing about how the IP will be perceived by platforms.

Often, ASN and network reputation are ignored, assuming it is enough to choose the right proxy type. In practice, the origin of the IP plays a big role: even mobile or residential proxies can work poorly if the pool is assembled from problematic networks with a bad reputation.

A separate mistake is buying a large batch of proxies at once without testing. Quality can vary greatly from region to region or even within one pool. Without a test, it is impossible to understand how suitable the proxies are for the task.

Also, proxies are often checked once and the result is considered final. IP reputation can change over time, especially during active work, so the lack of re-checks leads to unexpected blocks.

Conclusion

When choosing proxies, it is important to focus on specific quality parameters. IP Trust, network type, ASN reputation, GEO compliance, connection stability, speed, and correct rotation directly affect how proxies will work in real tasks.

They need to be selected for a specific scenario: requirements for ad cabinets, multi-accounting, and scraping differ. Universal solutions do not exist, so the correct approach is to first define the task, then check key parameters, and only after that make a decision about purchasing or scaling.