How to Test Proxy Quality Before Committing to a Provider

Not all proxies are created equal. A provider might advertise millions of IPs, but if half are dead and the other half are blacklisted, you are paying for nothing. Here is how to evaluate proxy quality before committing. The 5 Key Metrics 1. Success Rate The percentage of requests that return a valid response (HTTP 200). A good residential proxy provider should deliver 95%+ success rates on most targets. How to test: Send 100 requests to your target site through the proxy. Count successful responses. import requests success = 0 total = 100 proxy = { " http " : " http://user:pass@proxy:port " , " https " : " http://user:pass@proxy:port " } for i in range ( total ): try : r = requests . get ( " https://target-site.com " , proxies = proxy , timeout = 10 ) if r . status_code == 200 : success += 1 except : pass print ( f " Success rate: { success } / { total } ( { success } %) " ) 2. Response Time How fast the proxy responds. For scraping, under 2 seconds is acceptable. For account manageme