Our Proxy & VPN blog

Picture a price monitoring job that ran fine all summer and, sometime after 15 September 2026, started returning blocks, with nobody on the team changing anything.

One possible suspect is a changed default around Cloudflare Pay Per Crawl and its new sibling, Pay Per Use. According to Cloudflare's 1 July 2026 announcement, new domains with ads now block training crawlers and AI agents on ad pages by default, while search crawlers stay allowed. If your targets are long-established sites, the cause may be a publisher's own setting rather than the new default. Your logs will tell you which.

Most teams are not the target, but some will be collateral. Here is which side you are likely on, what it costs, and what you can legitimately do.

⏱ 15 min read       Updated October 2026

Your session was fine ten minutes ago. Now Claude Code just stops mid-task, with no error worth Googling. You restart it. It works for a while, then stalls again. It works on your colleague's machine, two desks over, which somehow makes it worse. You start wondering if the model got worse today, if your laptop needs a reboot, or if you're somehow holding the tool wrong.

Your tool isn't broken. Your network is lying to you.

This is what living with AI tools behind a corporate proxy actually feels like most days, and by the end of this article, you'll know exactly what your network is doing to your traffic, plus the exact commands to fix the right layer instead of guessing at the wrong one.

⏱ 20 min read       Updated September 2026

Most proxy buyers treat the market like a utility. Price per GB, pool size, uptime claim done. What that approach misses is that the product behaves completely differently depending on which region you're targeting. A residential proxy pool that performs well on US targets may fail on Southeast Asian ones. Pricing that looks competitive for European coverage may be inflated for Latin American IPs. A datacenter pool with 99% success in North America may hit 50% on certain APAC targets.

The proxy market is not one market. It's six distinct regional markets, each with different supply conditions, different demand drivers, different pricing mechanics, and different levels of maturity. Understanding these differences is what separates buyers who build reliable proxy infrastructure from those who burn budget on the wrong product for their region.

⏱ 20 min read       Updated August 2026

Ethical proxy use isn't about whether scraping is legal. It's about whether your data practices are defensible at every stage of the pipeline.

The proxy industry spent years arguing about legality. That debate is largely settled. Scraping publicly available data isn't a federal crime in the US, and most of Europe has followed suit. But legality was never the whole question. The more important question, the one courts, regulators, and enterprise legal teams are now asking, is whether your data practices hold up at every point in the chain: what you collect, how you collect it, where your infrastructure comes from, and what you do with the data after.

⏱ 13 min read       Updated July 2026

The term "proxy browser" means two completely different things depending on who's using it, and that confusion leads to bad decisions. Some people mean a standalone browser app with a proxy layer built in. Others mean a web-based proxy site where you type a URL, and the site fetches the page for you. Neither of these is the same as manually configuring a proxy server inside Chrome or Firefox, a third approach often overlooked by non-technical users that actually delivers the most flexibility.

If you've spent any time shopping for proxies or troubleshooting bans, you've probably come across the word "subnet", often in phrases like "subnet diversity" or "avoid proxies from the same subnet." But what does it actually mean, and why should you care?

This article covers the core concepts you need to understand: what subnets are, how they affect proxy performance, what happens when you ignore them, and how to use subnet knowledge to build a smarter proxy setup.

If you've ever searched for proxy advice online, you've seen the same questions pop up over and over again, on Reddit, in forums, in comment sections. And a lot of the answers people get are incomplete, outdated, or just plain wrong.

This post sets the record straight. Here are 7 of the most common proxy misconceptions people have, and what's actually true.

Most proxy discussions focus on web traffic. But not all network communication is HTTP, and not all applications behave like browsers. In many workflows, requests fail not because they are blocked, but because the proxy layer cannot handle the type of traffic being sent. Applications that rely on direct socket connections, UDP communication, or non-HTTP protocols often break or behave unpredictably when forced through HTTP-based proxy systems. SOCKS proxies exist for that gap.

Web traffic on the internet does not always travel directly between a user and a website. In many network environments, requests pass through intermediary systems that manage, route, or control how those connections are handled. One of the most common intermediaries used for web communication is the HTTP proxy. This intermediary layer can serve multiple purposes, from managing access to websites in corporate networks to optimizing traffic through caching or distributing large volumes of web requests across different infrastructures.

IPv6 exists because the Internet ran out of addresses. Every device that connects to the internet needs an IP address. The previous system, IPv4, was built with a fixed limit, and that limit has already been reached. IPv6 was introduced to remove this constraint. It replaces IPv4’s 32-bit addressing system with a 128-bit structure, allowing for an effectively unlimited number of unique addresses.

This shift changes more than scale. It alters how devices are identified, how networks are structured, and how communication happens without relying on shared addresses or workarounds.