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What is a proxy provider?

A proxy provider is a commercial service that sells access to a pool of IP addresses — residential, datacenter, or mobile — that you route your outbound HTTP traffic through. Proxy Hopper connects to these IPs when making requests on your behalf. Proxy Hopper does not supply IPs itself. You bring your own provider subscription and point Proxy Hopper at the IPs they give you.

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What to look for in a provider

When choosing a provider, consider: IP type
  • Datacenter IPs — cheap and fast, but easily detected and blocked by sophisticated sites
  • Residential IPs — real home internet connections, much harder to detect, higher cost
  • Mobile IPs — carrier IP addresses, highest trust level, most expensive
Geography
  • Does the API you’re scraping restrict by country? You’ll need IPs in the right region
  • Many providers let you filter by country, city, or ISP
Authentication
  • Most providers use HTTP Basic auth (username + password)
  • Some use IP whitelisting (no credentials needed, but you must register your server’s IP)
  • Proxy Hopper supports both
Pricing model
  • Per-GB — good if you make small, infrequent requests
  • Per-IP/month — good for sustained, high-volume use
  • Rotating vs static — rotating services assign a new IP on each connection; static let you reuse the same IP
Protocol
  • Proxy Hopper connects to providers over plain HTTP proxy protocol (it handles the HTTPS itself)
  • Ensure your provider supports HTTP proxy (not SOCKS-only)

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Getting IPs from a provider

The process varies by provider, but typically:
  1. Sign up and choose a plan
  2. In the dashboard, select the region(s) you need
  3. Copy the list of proxy endpoints — usually host:port pairs like us-pr.example.com:8080
  4. Note the credentials (username and password)
Some providers give you a single rotating endpoint (e.g. proxy.example.com:8080) that internally rotates IPs on each connection. Others give you a list of individual static IPs. Proxy Hopper works with both — use a list of individual IPs if you want Proxy Hopper to control the rotation itself.

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Configuring a provider in Proxy Hopper

proxyProviders:
  - name: my-provider
    auth:
      type: basic
      username: "my-username"
      password: "my-password"
    ipList:
      - "proxy1.example.com:8080"
      - "proxy2.example.com:8080"
      - "proxy3.example.com:8080"
    regionTag: US-East
The regionTag is optional but recommended — it appears as a region label on all Prometheus metrics, letting you query performance by region. For IP-whitelisted providers (no credentials): 
proxyProviders:
  - name: whitelisted-provider
    ipList:
      - "10.0.0.1:3128"
      - "10.0.0.2:3128"
    regionTag: EU

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Multiple providers

You can configure multiple providers and mix IPs from them into a single pool, or dedicate separate pools to each: 
proxyProviders:
  - name: provider-us
    auth:
      type: basic
      username: user
      password: secret
    ipList:
      - "10.0.0.1:3128"
      - "10.0.0.2:3128"
    regionTag: US

  - name: provider-au
    auth:
      type: basic
      username: user
      password: secret
    ipList:
      - "10.1.0.1:3128"
      - "10.1.0.2:3128"
    regionTag: AU

ipPools:
  - name: mixed-pool
    ipRequests:
      - provider: provider-us
        count: 3
      - provider: provider-au
        count: 3

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Providers vs inline IPs

Proxy providers are optional. For simple setups you can list IPs directly in a target or IP pool without a provider block. Providers become useful when:
  • Multiple targets or pools share the same credentials
  • You want per-region metrics via regionTag
  • You want to randomly sample a subset of IPs from a larger provider list (via ipRequests.count)
See Config Reference for the full provider field reference.