How to Choose the Best Proxy Provider (Checklist)

With hundreds of proxy providers flooding the market in 2026, making the wrong choice can lead to wasted budget, account bans, and project delays. Not all "residential" proxies are actually residential, and not all "elite" pools are elite.

Use this 10-point checklist to evaluate any provider before you commit.

The 10-Point Evaluation Checklist

1. Pool Size and Diversity

Does the provider have millions of unique IPs, or just a few thousand? A small pool leads to frequent IP reuse and higher ban rates.

• Check: Does Aethyn offer 10M+ IPs? (Yes).

2. Sourcing Transparency

Where do the IPs come from? Ethical providers use SDKs where users opt-in. Shady providers use botnets.

• Check: Ask for their sourcing policy.

3. Protocol Support

Do they support HTTP, HTTPS, and SOCKS5? SOCKS5 is essential for high-performance scraping and sneaker bots.

4. Targeting Granularity

Can you target by country? City? State? ISP? For localized marketing, city-level targeting is non-negotiable.

5. Success Rate (The "Gold" Metric)

What percentage of requests result in a 200 OK status on high-security targets like Amazon or Google?

6. Response Time (Latency)

Residential proxies are slower than datacenter ones, but they shouldn't be "dial-up" slow. Look for average response times under 1 second.

7. Concurrent Sessions

Does the provider limit how many requests you can send at once? Aethyn offers unlimited concurrent sessions on all residential plans.

8. Dashboard and API UX

Is it easy to generate credentials? Can you track your usage in real-time? A good API saves hours of developer time.

9. Support Quality

When your scraper breaks at 2 AM, is there a technical team available to help?

10. Pricing Model

Is it transparent? Beware of "hidden fees" for city targeting or specific protocols.

Why Aethyn Checks Every Box

We built Aethyn specifically to address the failures of legacy providers. We offer ethical sourcing, city-level targeting, and 99.9% success rates at a fraction of the cost of "Enterprise" competitors.

Run Your First Test with Aethyn