Craigslist residential proxies
Craigslist runs no flashy commercial vendor - its defense is homegrown and blunt: aggressive IP-reputation banning, tight per-IP rate limits, and a hard bias against datacenter and flagged ranges. Content is organized into hundreds of city subdomains (sfbay, nyc, london), and the useful public data - for-sale prices, housing listings, gigs, seller contact patterns - is inherently local. Because Craigslist blocks fast and thinks in cities, you need high-trust residential exits and the ability to pin them to the right metro.
Craigslist's IP-reputation banning is unusually punishing and its data is city-scoped, so highest-trust exits plus city-level targeting - both Elite-only capabilities - are what keep collection stable. Premium residential can handle light reading, but sustained multi-city crawls burn IPs fast without Elite's cleaner pools and city precision.
Why Craigslist is hard
- IP bans are swift and sticky - one flagged exit can be blocked across the whole site for a long window
- Data is fragmented across hundreds of city subdomains, so coverage means orchestrating many local vantage points
- Datacenter and low-reputation ranges are filtered hard, so exit quality matters far more than raw count
- Listings churn and expire quickly, so crawls must be frequent yet gentle enough not to trigger bans
How to approach Craigslist with Aethyn
Targeting & session tips
- Pair -city-<metro> with the matching subdomain (e.g. -city-chicago for chicago.craigslist.org) for locally consistent results
- Favor broad rotation over sticky sessions - long-lived sessions accumulate ban risk here
- Spread load thinly: many IPs each doing little beats a few IPs doing a lot
See the full targeting reference for username suffixes.