Shared and dedicated proxy

In a shared pool, the same address may go to you today and to another customer tomorrow. If the previous user behaved aggressively on a site, the address may have gained a worse reputation.

A dedicated proxy belongs only to you for the whole term. You alone are responsible for how websites perceive it, but you also pay for the address, not for traffic.

For data collection and most tasks, a shared pool is more convenient: it has many addresses, and a bad one can simply be replaced with a new one.

In Prokso the pool is shared: another customer may have used an address before. There are no dedicated single-user IPs in pay-per-GB plans. The anonymity filter in the pool settings filters out addresses that websites have already flagged as a proxy or VPN.

A shared list and a shared pool are not the same thing

On the market, "shared" is used for two different products. The first is a fixed list of addresses sold to several buyers at once: you and a few other people work through the same IPs in parallel. If one of them overdoes it on a site, you face the consequences too, and you usually cannot replace an address from the list.

The second is a large pool from which a gateway hands out addresses per request or per session. Here you are not the first user of an address either, but you depend on it only for as long as you hold it. A poor address is simply replaced by the next one.

How to check an address before work

If you have a proxy list, run it through the proxy checker: it shows which lines respond and from which country. For a single address the My IP page is more convenient: it shows the ISP and whether the country is the one you expect.

Then send one test request to the target site. A CAPTCHA or a refusal on the very first page signals that the address has a poor reputation. On port 823 or 824 the next request gets another IP; on a sticky port, switch to a different port. The anonymity filter in the Prokso pool settings filters out in advance the addresses that websites have flagged as a proxy or VPN.

How not to spoil an address for the next user

A shared pool works well as long as its users behave moderately. Keep a reasonable request pace, slow down in response to a 429 code and do not send all your connections to one site at the same time. What exactly is prohibited through a proxy is listed in the acceptable use policy.