The "fake residential proxy" trap
Ever notice how some "residential" proxies seem to perform worse than they did a few months ago, even when you're buying from the same kind of provider? I started looking into this after burning through way more proxies than I expected and eventually found that a lot of what gets sold as residential can still show up as hosting or datacenter infrastructure.
That might not matter much for basic scraping, but once you're dealing with stricter platforms, the difference becomes pretty noticeable. One thing I started checking more closely was the ASN/ISP info. If the IP is showing up under a hosting provider instead of the ISP you'd normally expect from a residential connection, that's usually a pretty good sign that the pool isn't what I thought I was paying for.
I've been testing proxyshard recently and, at least in my case, their residential pool has been pretty consistent. I've been running my current volume for about a month now and haven't seen the same drop-offs I was getting with some of the other pools I tried. Obviously that's just my experience so far and things can change over time.
The only real annoyance I've had is support being a little slow on non-urgent questions. Nothing terrible, but it does mean I've had to rely on their docs more than I'd like.
So yeah, these days I don't really take the "residential" label at face value. I usually check the ISP/ASN details first and make sure the IPs actually look consistent with what I'm paying for. It's saved me a lot of wasted time and money compared with just assuming the provider's label tells the whole story.