Proxies

A proxy is an IP address your requests route through instead of your home connection. Bots use proxies to run many tasks at once without every request coming from the same IP.

This page is background, not a setup guide. We do not sell proxies and we do not recommend providers. For provider recommendations and current proxy strategies, ask your cook group.

Why bots use proxies

Retailers track how many requests come from each IP. Running many tasks through one IP is an easy way to get blocked. Proxies give each task its own IP, which lets you scale task count and reduces the chance one ban takes down your whole setup.

The two main types

Type	How it works	How it is sold
Residential (resi)	Rotates through a large pool of real home IPs. Harder to detect and ban.	Per GB of bandwidth
ISP	Static datacenter IPs that present as home connections. Faster, but a flagged IP stays flagged.	Per IP

Which type for which site

Rough starting points, based on what has generally worked:

• Sites with aggressive anti-bot systems (Walmart, and Target when Shape security is high) tend to favor residential proxies.

• Sites where speed matters more than rotation (Amazon, Apple, Best Buy, and Target most of the time) tend to run fine on ISP proxies.

Treat this as a starting point, not gospel. Anti-bot systems change, and what the community runs on each site shifts with them. Check what is currently working before you buy anything.

Why we do not recommend providers

We are firm about this. We do not name proxy providers, and opening a ticket to ask will get you this same answer. It is not a brush-off, so here is the full reasoning.

• We do not know what anyone is running. This is the main one. Refract has no idea which providers users are hitting with. The proxy IP shows up in logs, but that is all it is to the bot: an IP. It does not know the provider, the proxy type, the region, or the session length, and none of that is stored. Tracking it would mean profiling what our users buy and run, which is a serious violation of trust and not something we will ever do. So when someone asks which provider is hitting right now, we genuinely do not have that answer to give.

• We do not sell proxies. Nobody on the team resells proxies or has a stake in a provider, so there is no provider we are steering you toward.

• It went badly when we did. Years ago we named providers. People would buy on our word, not get the results they hoped for, and then blame us for the recommendation or assume we were paid to promote it. We stopped, and we have not named one since.

What we will tell you is the proxy type that tends to work on a site, like residential versus ISP. Which company you buy that from is the part we stay out of.

The one exception: Best Buy

One Stop Proxies is the single provider we officially recommend, and we recommend them for Best Buy only.

Best Buy blocks proxies at the Akamai level, and One Stop is Akamai-optimized, which is why they keep passing there when other proxies stop. They may work on other sites too, but Best Buy is the only site we recommend them for. For every other site, the policy above stands: ask your cook group.

Start with your cook group. Provider quality varies enormously and changes over time. Which providers are performing on which sites is exactly the kind of information cook groups track and we do not.

Setting up proxies in Refract

Adding proxy lists and assigning them to monitors and tasks is covered in the setup guide:

Proxies