I've Met Hundreds of Data Teams, and 90% of Them Make the Same Mistake with Proxy IPs
Talking with more and more friends in data and global business, I've noticed a fascinating phenomenon.
When choosing a proxy service, the first question everyone asks is almost always, "How big is your IP pool?" As if a bigger number offers more security. One says, "I have 50 million," and another says, "I have 80 million," as if it’s an arms race.
Is 80 million necessarily better than 50 million?
It's like having a giant reservoir, but the pipe to your field is a thin, rusty, hole-riddled water hose. No matter how much water is in the reservoir, only a trickle reaches the ground, and it’s mixed with mud and sand.
Having been in this industry for a long time, we no longer look at that superficial number. We care about a more crucial metric: effective IP density.
This term might sound complicated, but it's simple once you understand it. It refers to how many of the IPs in a proxy pool are truly usable for your specific target, such as an e-commerce platform or a social media site.
What does "usable" mean? It means the request you send gets a correct response without being rejected, without triggering verification, and without being directly blocked.
A provider that boasts an IP inventory of 100 million sounds impressive. But if a large portion of those IPs has been flagged as high-risk or blacklisted by your target website, the effective IP density for your goal might be less than 0.1%. This means only one out of every thousand requests you send is successful.
The consequences of this inefficiency are catastrophic. Your data collection tasks are prolonged indefinitely, and time costs skyrocket. A high volume of failed requests can also trigger more severe risk control measures from the target website, making your already limited pool of usable IPs even worse. To make matters worse, your data might be contaminated with information from numerous error pages, making subsequent analysis and decision-making baseless. These are invisible costs, but they are lethal.
Therefore, a pool with only 20 million IPs but an effective density of 5% is far more valuable and efficient than one that sounds great at 100 million.
Why is this the case? The root lies in the IP lifecycle.
Residential IPs are not created out of thin air; they come from real home networks. An IP that works perfectly for you today might be used by someone else for a different purpose tomorrow, triggering risk control on a website and getting a hidden flag. The IP doesn't disappear; it stays in the pool, but it has become "dirty."
An IP pool is like a public swimming pool: the more people, the faster the water quality deteriorates. Without a continuous and powerful filtering and cleaning mechanism, the pool will quickly become murky.
This is why some smart providers, like Novada, which I’ve been following, repeatedly emphasize that they've built a pure IP pool.
The word "pure" is backed by a very complex system of dynamic monitoring, filtering, and elimination. They continuously test their IPs' performance on major global websites. Once an IP's request success rate drops or it gets flagged, they immediately isolate and clean it from the active pool.
This is both a capability and an attitude.
They are confident enough in their IP quality to offer free IP location down to the city and even ISP ASN level. Only a clean and massive IP pool can support such precise filtering. When you need a batch of IPs from New York provided by a specific ISP, they can ensure they give you a batch of truly usable, proven IPs.
So, the next time you evaluate a proxy service, stop asking the most foolish question: "How many IPs do you have?"
You should ask: "What is your request success rate on my target websites?" "How often do you check the validity of your IPs?" "Can you provide the specific region and ISP IPs I need?"
These few questions can help you weed out at least 90% of the "paper tigers" on the market.
Shift your focus from the abstract quantity to the concrete quality and efficiency. This is where the real gap between professionals and ordinary users lies.