Introduction to Proxies

What is a Proxy?

An IP address is the unique numerical identifier assigned to any device that connects to the Internet. Every device will have its own IP address for as long as it's online, and like a physical street address or a phone number, this enables devices to send messages back and forth. A traditional IP address (IPv4 format) looks something like this: 198.41.129.1.

A proxy is basically a computer on the internet with its own IP address that your computer can access. When you send a web request, your request goes to the proxy server first. The proxy server then makes your web request on your behalf, collects the response from the web server, and forwards you the web page data so you can see the page in your browser. It essentially serves as an intermediary between your home machine or server and the website you are visiting.

Proxies essentially are unique IP addresses that can change the actual IP of your computer on your network and mask it with a new IP address. When a website receives a request from you while you are using a proxy, they will only see the IP of the proxy, not the IP of the device you are using. If you live in Texas for example, but are using proxies located in Virginia, then the website will only see requests coming from the proxy located in Virginia, and not the IP address from Texas.

Why are Proxies Needed?

When a person is manually accessing a website and trying to purchase an item, realistically they aren’t refreshing multiple times within the span of a few seconds trying to cart the item and complete the different checkout stages. Many websites do not like to see too many requests come from one IP at once. If you’re running a bot, this generally means you’d only be able to run one task at best on your local IP for many websites, as the one task would mimic the person manually trying to cart and complete checkout.

If you run too many tasks from that same IP, your bot’s refresh delay is too low, or you are reusing the same proxy across multiple bots, the bot(s) will be sending too many requests in a given amount of time to the website. This can cause either a temporary or permanent ban. Each site will have its own limit in regards to running multiple tasks per IP/proxy.

Types of Proxies

For botting purposes, you will typically see three types of proxies mentioned. The first type will be datacenter proxies, the second type will be residential proxies, and the third type ISP Datacenter Proxies (Resicenters).

Datacenter Proxies

Datacenter proxies are private proxies that are not connected to or owned by an Internet Service Provider (ISP). These proxies are owned by a secondary company and provide you with entirely private IP addresses. Datacenter proxies will be dedicated proxies that are physically hosted somewhere, such as a datacenter facility in Virginia.

Pros

Datacenter proxies are known for their speed, reliability and unlimited bandwidth (no data caps).

Speed - For the fastest possible connections to a website, these will be your best option. If you are running from a computer or server that is physically located close to where your datacenter proxies are hosted, then the response time, or ping, will be significantly lower which will drastically help you, especially in FCFS releases.

Datacenter proxies are typically hosted on either a 1 GBPS port or 10 GBPS port. This means that connections going through that specific proxy will be capped at that particular speed of either 1 or 10 GBPS. There isn’t a major advantage of having 10 GBPS over 1 GBPS for sneaker botting purposes. Note that proxies will not increase your connection speed.

Reliability - Because datacenter proxies are dedicated and only being used by one person at any single time (if your provider is reputable and not reselling shared proxies), this significantly reduces the possibility of slowdowns and downtime during a drop as long as you do not run too many tasks through one proxy at a time.

Unlimited Bandwidth - The amount of traffic (data) sent to and from your server with your proxies during the month does not have a data cap. This means you can run your proxies in your bots for as long as you want and not have to worry about reaching a certain data limit. You can think of this as an unlimited data cell phone plan.

Cons

Datacenter proxies are easier to flag by websites, and can be expensive to purchase in bulk.

Bans - Pure datacenter proxies are currently banned or flagged on a wide range of sites, and no longer as viable as they once were. This is because these are not from a residential ISP such as Comcast or Verizon. If a site is tracing back these IPs, they’re quite easy to flag and ban for not being associated with a residential IP. Datacenter proxies are prone to massive subnet bans if even one IP from that subnet is detected as a probable bot related IP. Many sites have security measures in place now to flag these types of proxies much faster now.

Price - Datacenter proxies tend to be more expensive when purchasing in bulk. If you plan to run only dc proxies for a release, most sites will require you to maintain a 1:1 task to proxy ratio, meaning you’ll have to spend a good amount on dc proxies for the release you’re running for.

Residential Proxies

A residential proxy is an IP address provided by an ISP to a homeowner. It is a genuine IP address attached to a physical location by an ISP. This means that requests from these types of proxies will appear more humanlike to websites that may potentially be tracing back different IPs making requests to the site. These types of proxies will not physically be hosted somewhere in one place like all datacenter proxies would be, but instead will be generated from different pools in different geographical locations such as the United States, Great Britain, New York, etc.

Pros

Trustworthy – a residential IP has the ability to mask itself as a legitimate IP address due to them being provided by an ISP. A website's bot security system will usually place more trust in residential IPs. If a website is filtering for suspected proxy connections, then residential IPs will be more effective than traditional datacenter proxies for accessing the site. If the proxy is traced back, it would show as being owned by an ISP and not a hosting company.

Geographical Locations and Pools – Residential proxy providers will give you access to a large number of geographical locations and pools from which you can generate IPs from. Typically providers will offer residential proxy pools at the city, state and country level, and can include locations such as Dallas, New York, United States, United Kingdom, etc. This is helpful when going for international releases that would geolock that drop to only IP addresses located in a specified region, such as Japan or EU only.

Cost - Purchasing residential proxies can be much cheaper than buying datacenter proxies, as you will be paying for the allotted bandwidth only. This can be useful if you plan to run tons of tasks and still be able to maintain a 1:1 proxy to task ratio, as you will be able to generate as many residential proxies as you want from the pool you are generating from for most providers as long as you stay within your data cap.

Cons

Shared IPs - Residential proxies are not dedicated to you only, and it is possible for different IPs from a pool you generated from to be used by more than one person at any single time. This potentially can cause slowdowns, timeouts, dead or banned proxies during a drop since the same proxy/IP is being used by other people at the same time. Because they are shared, there is a good chance that a lot of residential proxies in the pool you’re generating from have already been banned in the past. You will have to test residential proxies prior to a drop and kill proxies that are either banned or dead.

Residential proxies primarily come from major providers such as Net Nut, Oxylabs, Smart, etc. Most providers will sell you residential proxies that come from sources like these. Keep this in mind when purchasing residential proxies from a few different providers. Chances are that you’re buying proxies that are resold from the same parent provider and the effectiveness of those proxies won’t be any different from each other.

Speed - Residential Proxies tend to be lower in bandwidth and higher in latency than datacenter proxies. This means tasks will be slower when using these proxies in comparison to datacenter proxies, which can hurt your chances greatly during a limited FCFS drop.

Limited Bandwidth - The amount of traffic (data) sent to and from your server with your proxies during the month does have a data cap. This means you can only run your proxies in your bots until you reach your data cap limit. If you have a 4 GB plan for example, you can run tasks with those proxies freely until you reach 4 GB worth of usage. After your plan runs out of data, you’ll have to renew or purchase another residential proxy plan in order to continue using them.

Dirty IPs - Since residential proxies are shared IPs and typically come from major providers such as NetNut, Smart, Oxylabs, etc. some are already flagged for spam or other malicious purposes, and if a website does a traceback on the IP to validate it, they can see this and cancel the order that was placed from that IP. Additionally, some residential IP addresses are just stolen IPs from ISPs and can be terminated at any time. This is a problem for sites like Shopify since task IP is used for captcha harvester, and this can potentially flag your Google Account temporarily.

Types of Residential Proxies

The two types of residential proxies you will see are Static (Sticky) or Rotating (Dynamic).

Static (Sticky)

• The proxy will maintain the same IP address after each request.

• Static Residential Proxies tend to have faster speeds compared to Rotating Residential Proxies.

• Mandatory to use for queue based releases, such as Shopify antibot, Yeezy Supply/Adidas, Footsites and Finish Line. These types of websites require you to maintain the same IP address during the release in order to complete checkout. If the IP address of your task changes, you will lose your place through the queue if you passed and have to wait again to get through.

Rotating (Dynamic)

• The IP address of the proxy will rotate after each request.

• Helpful to use for monitoring purposes or when harvesting Akamai cookies for sites like Yeezy Supply, Adidas, Footsites, etc.

In summary, only static proxies should be used for your bot tasks during a release. Rotating proxies should only be used for monitoring purposes (which I don’t recommend due to limited data caps) or for cookie harvesting.

ISP Datacenter Proxies

ISP DC proxies, sometimes called resicenters, are essentially a hybrid of a DC and Residential proxy. ISP Proxies are essentially the same IPv4 subnet blocks hosted on a data center server, that are supported by an ISP network circuit, such as Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, etc. Basically, they are DC proxies that are supported by a residential backbone. This type of proxy comes with the benefits associated with DC and Residential proxies.

Pros

Speed - ISP Datacenter proxies come with the same fast speeds as a datacenter proxy. If you are running from a computer or server that is physically located close to where your datacenter proxies are hosted, then the response time, or ping, will be significantly lower which will drastically help you, especially in FCFS releases.

ISP DC proxies will often have higher ping than your standard DC proxy. This is because they have to go through an additional network from the ISP after going through the initial DC server to gain it’s residential proxy properties, which will cause a slight increase in latency.

ISP DC proxies are also hosted on either a 1 GBPS port or 10 GBPS port. This means that connections going through that specific proxy will be capped at that particular speed of either 1 or 10 GBPS. Just like Datacenter proxies, there isn’t a major advantage of having 10 GBPS over 1 GBPS for sneaker botting purposes. These proxies will not increase your internet speed.

Reliability - ISP DC proxies are also dedicated and only being used by one person at any single time. This significantly reduces the possibility of slowdowns and downtime during a drop as long as you do not run too many tasks through one proxy at a time. Additionally, you will not have to worry about testing proxies prior to a drop to kill banned or dead proxies as you would with pure residential proxies.

Unlimited Bandwidth - Just like a datacenter proxy, the amount of traffic (data) sent to and from your server with your proxies during the month does not have a data cap. This means you can run your proxies in your bots for as long as you want and not have to worry about reaching a certain data limit. You can think of this as an unlimited data cell phone plan.

Trustworthy – An ISP DC proxy has the properties of a real residential IP, and makes it harder for sites to detect it as a potential datacenter IP as it appears to show as a registered IP to a provider such as Comcast or Verizon. Proxy protection measures that a site will potentially be using during a release will place more trust in these types of residential IPs. So even though you are enjoying the benefits of a datacenter proxy, the site will unlikely be able to detect the proxy connection as easily as a pure datacenter proxy, and will think you are a human accessing the site.

Cons

Price - ISP DC proxies are even more expensive than your standard datacenter plan, oftentimes coming in at $2/IP after discounts. If you plan to run only ISP DC proxies for a release, keep in mind the amount of proxies you will need and your budget. Most sites will require you to maintain a 1:1 task to proxy ratio to avoid bans, so plan accordingly.

Datacenter vs Residential vs ISP DC

DC proxies offer the fastest speeds and reliability on the market, however most websites already have security measures in place that can detect these types of proxies and are no longer as effective as they once were.

Residential proxies appear more humanlike, so they do not get flagged as easily as a standard DC proxy. However, they are known to be much slower than datacenter proxies, and because they are shared IPs, they are also more prone to dying or getting banned during a release from too many requests going through a particular IP.

ISP DC proxies are the most effective type of proxies available on the market. As mentioned previously, they come with the benefits of a DC proxy in the form of the fastest speeds and reliability, while holding the properties of a residential proxy that make it seem human like when a site traces the IP back. Additionally, there are no data caps for you to worry about.

While they are more expensive, many sites hold security measures in place now that prevent you from being able to run hundreds of tasks that you were once able to do due to increased security factors such as reCAPTCHA and potential billing profile bans. Oftentimes, it is more beneficial to just run 100 tasks with 100 ISP DC proxies than it is to run 200 tasks with 200 residential proxies.

ISP DC proxies are not invincible, however. Just like residential proxies and your localhost IP, they can be banned if they are exhibiting abusive behavior, such as too many requests within a short amount of time, such as not going 1:1 with proxy task ratios, running too low of a delay, reusing the same proxies in different bots, etc. Luckily, they are not as prone to mass subnet bans as a pure datacenter proxy subnet would be. This means that on some sites, if others on the same proxy subnet as you are irresponsibly using their proxies, then you may not necessarily be negatively affected by it right away.

Selecting a Region for Proxies

Dedicated DC/ ISP DC Proxies from providers will typically be hosted in the following areas:

• Virginia/Ashburn

• New York

• Chicago

You should ideally purchase the one that is located physically closest to the computer you’ll be running from. If your server is located in Virginia, you should look to purchase proxies located in Virginia for lowest possible pings. If you’re running from your home PC, purchase proxies located closer to where you live if possible.

• Virginia Server ↔ Virginia Proxies

• New York Server ↔ New York Proxies

• Chicago Server ↔ Chicago Proxies

Note that this is just what is preferred for absolute lowest pings. You can run from a Virginia server with New York proxies and you’d be fine from my experience. In this scenario, you can slightly lower the delays of your bot by maybe 50-100 ms to compensate.

For most websites, it’s not really important to have proxies that are located right next to the site’s servers. For example, you don’t necessarily need to use VA proxies to hit Shopify anymore. You can hit perfectly fine with NY proxies as an example. This applies to most sites. You don’t need a specific region for Shopify, SNKRS, Supreme, Footsites, FNL, etc. Just focus mainly on lowering your ping.

Proxy Formats and Authentication

• IP - This will be in the IPv4 format, such as 172.16.254.1.

• Port - Virtual pathways that allow data to flow back and forth on a single IP address. Port numbers are appended to the end of IP addresses. This will be a number between 1-65535.

• USER - Username needed to access the proxy.

• PASS - Password needed to access the proxy.

Proxies will be given to you in either User Password or IP Authenticated format:

User Password Authenticated - IP:PORT:USER:PASS

Ex: If your proxy was 154.10.45.103:3128:Test:ABC123

• IP - 154.10.45.103

• Port - 3128

• USER - Test

• PASS - ABC123

Basically, you will be separating the parameters in between each of the : in your proxy to get each individual field.

You will need to enter the User and Password fields of this type of proxy, or you’ll see errors when trying to connect to a site through the proxy.

IP Authenticated - IP:PORT

Ex: If your proxy was 154.10.45.103:3128

• IP - 154.10.45.103

• Port - 3128

If a proxy is IP authenticated, then you will have to input the IP of the location of the computer or server that the proxies will be used from in some type of dashboard provided by your proxy provider. You can find this IP by visiting something like https://whatismyipaddress.com/ from the pc you’ll be accessing the proxies from.

If you do have an IP authenticated proxy, then you will have to authenticate the IP accessing the proxies first, or they won’t work.

Subnet

For the purposes of sneaker botting and proxies, when a subnet is mentioned, it is simply referring to the range of IP addresses in one block. Depending on the subnet, there can be 254 usable IP addresses in one subnet (you can get subnets in higher denominations such as 512 or 1024 IPs). As an example, let's say you purchase your own subnet for yourself. When you receive your 254 IPs from this subnet, the IP address will look something like this:

208.220.155.1:65073

208.220.155.2:65073

208.220.155.3:65073

.

.

.

208.220.155.253:65073

208.220.155:254:65073

In this case, the subnet would refer to 208.220.155.X, where X is the set of numbers between 1 and 254 in sequential order to lay out all usable 254 IPs in that particular subnet.

When a proxy provider sells you DC or ISP DC proxies, you will receive proxies from a particular subnet. If you buy 100 proxies, then typically you’ll get 100 of 254 proxies in that subnet.

Usually subnets will have what’s known as a CIDR prefix attached to it. This refers to the number of IPs available within that subnet:

• /24 = 254

• /23 = 512

• /22 = 1024

Private Subnets

A private subnet refers to owning the entire block of IPs as mentioned above to yourself. This means that if a store were to flag IP addresses based on their subnet, it is solely on you whether or not the subnet gets flagged if you displayed abusive behavior.

Private subnets can be helpful so you are in control of what happens with your subnet. It can be helpful to have for sites like Shopify (if not throttled) and Supreme (if it can queue for payment). However, they can be very expensive, generally around $500 for 254 IP's. For Shopify, you won't be able to take advantage of this since you can only run 5-10 tasks for an antibot release. It is not necessary to own a private subnet for sites like Footsites and Yeezy Supply, as these two sites are much easier to purchase public ISP proxies for that work just fine. The benefit of a private subnet on Footsites would be for it to be unlocked 24/7 so you can run for restocks freely.

You can purchase a private subnet from providers such as Leaf, Oculus, Joe, Stat, Notify, Baker and more.

ASN

ASN stands for Autonomous System Number. It is a unique number assigned to an autonomous system (AS) by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA).

This essentially refers to blocks of IP addresses which have a distinctly defined number registered to their IP addresses that are managed by an organization/ proxy company.

An example is shown here https://www.whatismyip.com/asn/US/.

If a proxy company called Proxy Corporation owned 10 subnets, they could all be assigned to the same ASN across all subnets. This could be an ASN such as AS03. This means if you were to backtrace all 10 subnets, you would find them to be associated with the ASN AS03.

Common Proxy Ban Errors

Error 429/Rate Limit

The user has sent too many requests in a given amount of time. This is also known as rate limiting or throttling. If a website detects too many requests from one IP address, its rate limiting solution may be to temporarily block that IP for suspected bot activity. In this case, you will still have access to the site typically, but will not be able to cart anything or the website will intentionally slow down how long it takes pages to load. This type of ban is usually temporary and will go away after a certain amount of time.

In other cases, the website may have already flagged a specific IP, and during a drop with heightened bot security, will preemptively rate limit the IP and prevent them from being used to cart or go to checkout.

Error 403/Forbidden

This essentially means access to a website from your specific IP has been denied. This can be either an IP range that has been flagged already without you doing anything (mesh for example), or an IP exhibited abusive behavior likely to be associated with a bot and was denied from accessing the website. This type of ban can be either temporary or permanent.

Geolocation

Some proxies have not had their registered geolocation information updated in some databases that a site may cross reference when you access the site with that IP. This means even if you’re using proxies located in Virginia, the website may still see it as an IP from the Ukraine for example. The proxy provider will have to fix this problem, and can sometimes happen when a block of IPs are new and the geolocation hasn’t been updated. This can be a problem on sites that geolock such as Supreme, where you will be redirected from the US store to the UK store for example.

Subnet Ban

A subnet ban is when a site bans all proxies belonging to a subnet, regardless of an individual IP from the subnet showing abusive behavior on that site or not. Since there are 254 IPs in one subnet, then other people using that same subnet as you can be abusing their proxies, such as running for restocks, setting low monitor delays, not going at least 1:1, etc. When a site starts to see too many requests coming from a subnet, it makes it a lot easier for them to flag and ban that subnet if they want to. Since most providers will sell proxies in packs of 10, 25, 50 or 100, note that you could be affected by a subnet flag without actually abusing your proxies.

Example:

Two botters purchase proxies belonging to subnet 208.220.155.X.

Botter #1 owns proxies Botter #2 owns proxies

208.220.155.1:65073 208.220.155.10:65073

208.220.155.2:65073 208.220.155.11:65073

208.220.155.3:65073 208.220.155.12:65073

Let’s say botter #1 is running 500 monitor delay for restocks all day, and botter #2 isn’t even running anything. The website can detect this abusive behavior by Botter #1 from the subnet 208.220.155.X, and then flag all IPs pertaining to that subnet. Botter # 2 now has flagged proxies and didn’t do anything on his end to earn that flag.

This has been a recent problem with Shopify and throttled proxies. Proxies can be delivered to you clean, but it just takes some irresponsible botting from one person in order to get the subnet flagged. This can happen on any site if they choose to flag proxies this way.

ASN Ban

An ASN ban is a higher level ban than a subnet ban, that can affect multiple subnets. This type of ban targets all IP blocks that are associated with a registered ASN.

Let’s say 10 different subnet blocks are registered to a company called Proxy Corporation, with an assigned ASN number of AS03. If the website detects too much abusive behavior coming from traced back IPs associated with the ASN number of AS03, then they can do a wide ban on these types of IPs. In this scenario, all 10 different subnet blocks are effectively banned, regardless of individual subnet behavior.

Supreme has in the past done this type of a ban right after a drop for different weeks. Think back to the bandana box logo hoodie drop, and how tons of proxies were banned shortly after initial release.