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Definitions · 26 terms

Proxy glossary.

Plain-English definitions of every term you'll see when buying or building with proxy networks. From residential vs datacenter to JA3 fingerprints to MCP servers.

Proxy types (5) Sessions & rotation (3) Targeting (2) Anti-bot bypass (6) Protocols (4) Infrastructure (3) General concepts (3)

Proxy types

Residential Proxy

A proxy whose IP address belongs to a real consumer ISP and is assigned to a real home internet connection — making it the hardest type to d…

Datacenter Proxy

An IP address hosted in a commercial datacenter (AWS, Google Cloud, dedicated hosting). Cheapest and fastest, but easiest for sites to detec…

An IP from a 4G or 5G cellular carrier (Verizon, T-Mobile, Vodafone), shared dynamically across many real subscribers via NAT. The most expe…

ISP Proxy (Static Residential)

A datacenter-hosted IP that is registered with an ISP — gives you datacenter speed with residential-grade trust. Also called "static residen…

Residential vs Datacenter

The two main proxy types. Residential = real consumer ISP IPs, hardest to detect, $4–$10/GB. Datacenter = server-room IPs, fast and cheap, e…

Sessions & rotation

A configuration where the same proxy IP is reused across multiple requests for a defined window (e.g., 1–30 minutes), so the destination sit…

Rotating Session

A configuration where every single request goes through a different IP from the proxy pool — maximizing distribution and avoiding rate limit…

Switching between IPs in a pool — either automatically (provider-side rotation) or programmatically (you maintain the pool and pick).

Targeting

Configuring a proxy request to come from a specific country, region, city, or even ZIP code. Essential for ad verification, local SEO, and p…

Selecting a proxy IP from a specific Autonomous System Number — i.e., a specific internet service provider. Useful for ad verification on sp…

Anti-bot bypass

CAPTCHA Solving

Automated bypass of CAPTCHA challenges (reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, FunCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile) using AI image recognition or human solver ne…

A CDN and security service that fronts a large share of the internet. Its anti-bot system (including Turnstile, "I'm Under Attack" mode, and…

JA3 / TLS Fingerprint

A hash of the TLS handshake fields a client sends, which identifies the underlying HTTP library or browser regardless of User-Agent. Anti-bo…

Headless Browser

A real browser (Chrome, Firefox) running without a visible UI, controlled by a script (Playwright, Puppeteer, Selenium). Used when JavaScrip…

An HTTP header that identifies the client software making a request — e.g., the browser name and version. The first thing anti-bot systems c…

A server-side rule that throttles or blocks clients that send too many requests in a given time window. Forces scrapers to slow down or use …

Protocols

A flexible proxy protocol that can tunnel any TCP or UDP traffic — not just HTTP. Required for non-web protocols and useful for HTTP traffic…

HTTP/HTTPS Proxy

The most common proxy protocol, where the client sends standard HTTP requests to a proxy server, which forwards them to the destination and …

A modern UDP-based transport protocol that replaces TCP for HTTP/3. Faster connection setup but harder to proxy through traditional HTTP pro…

A proxy with an IPv6 (128-bit) IP address instead of the older IPv4 (32-bit). Cheaper and more abundant than IPv4 but only useful when the d…

Infrastructure

The total number of unique IP addresses a proxy provider has access to. Pool size affects rotation diversity and ban-rate resilience.

A proxy that sits in front of a web server (not in front of clients) — used for load balancing, caching, and security. Different from the fo…

Antidetect Browser

A specialized browser (Multilogin, GoLogin, AdsPower, Dolphin Anty) that lets you create multiple isolated browser profiles, each with its o…

General concepts

The automated extraction of data from websites — typically by sending HTTP requests, parsing the response HTML, and storing structured data.

Search Engine Results Page — the page Google (or Bing, etc.) returns for a query. SERP scraping is one of the largest web scraping use cases…

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open protocol from Anthropic that lets LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT) directly query data sources, run tools, and access live information through…