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Comment by aw123 | Hacker News Reader

10 points·aw123··5 comments

You really want the cheapest? The cheapest have awful IP reputation, mostly datacenter IPs.

Most suppliers in the market are fly-by-night criminals or full-on botnet operators, mostly based out of Eastern Europe and Hong Kong. Then you have the slightly less shady Luminati type suppliers who pay developers to drop an SDK into their app.

If you want a legit supplier you can invoice and not have to use crypto: https://oxylabs.io/pricing/residential-proxy-pool

Here are some insights into how proxies are sourced: https://scrapingfish.com/how-ips-for-web-scraping-are-source...

There's also an option to build your own mobile proxy pool which gives you very good reputation IPs for web scraping and doesn't harm other people: https://scrapingfish.com/blog/byo-mobile-proxy-for-web-scrap...

Web scraping through a proxy to hide your own address is a shady business, by definition. So the "doesn't harm other people" bit is an oxymoron, IMO.

I agree that web scraping is a shady business in many cases but there is definitely a difference between setting up a few mobile proxies for yourself and using devices and networks which belong to other people without them even knowing this until they cannot access some websites because there was a bot detected in their network.

Some of the affected people somehow knows that are being used for that, some companies pay them for amount of requests they pass through. But they ignore the potential harmful consequences for them, and the consequences for the scrapped sites (from loss of performance to not be table to serve content) and the intended users for those sites.

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