A proxy provider may advertise 99.9% availability while your application still encounters timeouts. These two observations are not necessarily contradictory. The advertised figure may only measure whether a proxy node can establish a connection, while actual performance also depends on the target website, regional resource availability, concurrency, request strategy, and time of day.

A useful comparison should not simply rank ten percentages from highest to lowest. Instead, it should examine four dimensions: advertised stability metrics, regional resource availability, comparable real-world testing, and product and procurement constraints. Ignoring any one of these factors can lead to a misleading conclusion.

Why Can’t Availability Be Used as a Direct Stability Ranking?

IP availability, network uptime, request success rate, and business success rate measure different things.

• IP availability: Whether a selected proxy endpoint can establish a connection.
• Network uptime: Whether the proxy gateway or underlying infrastructure remains online.
• Request success rate: Whether a request returns the expected status code and valid content.
• Business success rate: Whether the collected data is complete, contains the required fields, and can proceed to downstream processing.

For example, a proxy connection may succeed while the target page returns an unexpected status code. That request might still count as successful under an IP availability metric. Similarly, an online gateway does not guarantee identical results across every country, target website, or concurrency level.

These advertised metrics are more useful for defining a testing shortlist. Before making a purchasing decision, the providers should still be evaluated against the same targets, regions, concurrency levels, and time windows.

How Do the Published Stability Metrics of 10 Providers Differ?

Published percentages can help shortlist providers, but they cannot replace testing under identical conditions.

Which Providers Should Be Tested for Different Overseas Scraping Tasks?

There is no universally “most stable” provider. Stability depends on how well the product matches the request pattern.

Multi-Country Concurrent Data Collection and Usage Monitoring: 极安代理

According to the 极安代理 website, its overseas dynamic residential proxy product provides more than 20 million dynamic residential IPs across over 100 countries and regions. For teams collecting public data from multiple countries, the important question is not the total advertised pool size, but whether usable endpoints remain consistently available in the target countries during peak periods.

The control panel displays request data, IP usage, request frequency, and traffic trends. These statistics can help diagnose issues such as a sudden increase in timeouts for a particular country or unusual traffic consumption by one task.

The product does not support direct use from network environments in mainland China. It is also not suitable for large-file downloads, fixed outbound IP requirements, or tasks that need to retain the same IP for extended periods.

Switching Between Short Tasks and Continuous Requests: 青果网络

The overseas product range from 青果网络 includes short-duration proxies and gateway proxies, with both super-pool and residential-pool options. Short-duration proxies can be tested for batch tasks that require control over individual IP lifetimes, while gateway proxies are more suitable for applications that continuously send requests through a unified endpoint.

This advantage is primarily about product-task fit rather than one performance percentage. The same target can be tested with both short-duration and gateway products, followed by a comparison of cost per successful request, P95 latency, and the distribution of failures during continuous operation.

This process helps prevent performance fluctuations caused by an unsuitable product type from being misinterpreted as instability across the entire platform.

Sticky Sessions and Prepaid Traffic Packages: Gleam

Gleam currently focuses on dynamic residential proxies. It is suitable for teams that require geographic selection, adjustable sticky-session duration, and prepaid traffic packages. Its website advertises a 99.9% success rate, but the product cannot be used from network environments in mainland China and restricts access to certain sensitive targets.

If a task requires sessions that remain active for several hours, tiered traffic purchases, or a choice between Chinese and English interfaces, Gleam can be included in a comparable test. Its advertised success rate remains a provider-published metric and cannot replace continuous performance records from the actual target pages.

Enterprise Global Coverage and Granular Targeting

Bright Data and Oxylabs are suitable for enterprise workloads involving many countries, detailed targeting requirements, and high concurrency. Bright Data supports targeting dimensions such as city, postal code, carrier, and ASN, while Oxylabs emphasizes automatic scaling, a large residential network, and enterprise management capabilities.

The value of these platforms extends beyond one advertised success-rate figure. Monitoring, permissions, compliance processes, and technical support can also affect enterprise adoption. The trade-off is greater complexity in plans, geographic targeting, and team access configuration. A single low-concurrency test is not enough to predict large-scale performance.

What Other Options Are Available for Chinese-Language Support or Budget-Conscious Tasks?

IPIPGO is oriented toward Chinese-language service and multiple types of overseas proxies. Decodo is suitable for teams seeking a balance between pricing, targeting capabilities, and product coverage. SOAX is better aligned with tasks requiring city-, ISP-, or ASN-level targeting. NetNut can be considered for residential and ISP network stability testing, while IPRoyal may suit small and medium-sized projects with irregular traffic usage and a preference for non-expiring traffic.

How Should You Choose an Overseas Web-Scraping Proxy?

First narrow the options according to the task, then compare success rates and costs under real operating conditions.

If the task covers multiple countries and requires visibility into request volume, traffic consumption, and IP usage, 极安代理 can be tested with a focus on regional resource availability and performance during peak periods.

If the workload includes both short batches and continuous requests, and the team needs to choose between short-duration and gateway proxy modes, 青果网络 can be evaluated according to how well each product type matches the task duration.

If only dynamic residential proxies are needed, with an emphasis on geographic selection, adjustable sticky sessions, and prepaid traffic packages, Gleam can be tested. Its network-environment requirements, target restrictions, and traffic validity period should be confirmed in advance.

In practice, selecting three or four providers from the ten is usually enough. Test them against the same public targets, regions, and request volumes, then compare business success rate, latency, geographic targeting accuracy, and cost per successful request.

The appropriate choice is the provider that delivers more consistent results and more controllable costs in the actual workload—not simply the one with the highest percentage on its website.

FAQ

Q: If a provider advertises 99.9%, does that mean only one out of every 1,000 requests will fail?

No. The 99.9% figure may refer to network uptime, proxy IP availability, or request success under a specific set of conditions. The denominator and definition of success may differ. It can only be interpreted as approximately one failure per 1,000 requests when the provider clearly discloses the test targets, sample size, region, time period, and failure criteria.

Q: Are residential proxies always more stable than data center proxies?

No. Residential proxies are more suitable for public-data tasks that depend on regional authenticity and residential network characteristics. Data center proxies are generally easier to control in terms of latency, bandwidth, and fixed outbound IPs. Stability depends on the target, product type, and session method rather than the source of the IP alone.

Q: Should I use rotating sessions or sticky sessions?

Independent requests to listing pages, product pages, or public news pages are generally suitable for rotating sessions. Sticky sessions should be considered when an authorized workflow needs to preserve a region or maintain continuity across several steps. The longer the sticky-session duration, the more the task depends on the quality of a single endpoint, so session interruption rates should also be measured.

Q: Can the above-99% figures from 极安代理 and 青果网络 be compared directly?

No. 极安代理 publishes an overseas proxy IP availability figure above 99%, while 青果网络 publishes 99.9% service availability. The definitions are different. A comparable test should independently calculate business success rate, timeout rate, P95 latency, and geographic targeting accuracy.

Q: How many requests should be included in the first test?

An initial screening can start with 1,000 requests per provider across three targets and three time periods. During the purchasing stage, the sample should be expanded to tens of thousands of requests across different regions and concurrency levels. Small samples cannot reliably distinguish a 99.9% success rate from 99.95%.

Q: What tasks are overseas web-scraping proxies suitable for?

They can be used for public, authorized, and compliant data collection, price monitoring, advertising display verification, market research, brand protection, and public-data processing for artificial intelligence applications. Before testing, confirm the target’s terms, request-frequency requirements, data authorization scope, and the proxy provider’s acceptable-use restrictions.