40 terms, defined plainly.
No marketing definitions. Where a term is used inconsistently across providers, we say so.
A
- Ad verification
- Confirming ads render correctly and to the right audience, from real IPs in each market.
- intermediate
- Anti-detect browser
- A browser that gives each profile a distinct, internally consistent fingerprint.
- beginner
- ASN
- Autonomous System Number — the identifier of the network that owns an IP range. Anti-bot systems score it heavily.
- intermediate
B
- Backconnect proxy
- A single gateway address that transparently rotates across a pool behind it.
- intermediate
- Browser fingerprint
- The composite of properties a browser exposes — canvas, fonts, WebGL, timezone — used to identify a device.
- intermediate
- Browser profile
- An isolated container of cookies, storage and fingerprint representing one identity.
- beginner
C
- Canvas fingerprinting
- Identifying a device from tiny rendering differences when drawing to an HTML canvas.
- advanced
- CAPTCHA trigger rate
- How often requests through a network are challenged. A direct proxy-quality signal.
- intermediate
- CGNAT
- Carrier-grade NAT — many subscribers sharing one public IP, which is why mobile IPs carry high trust.
- advanced
- City-level targeting
- Geo-targeting precise enough to select a metropolitan area. Accuracy varies widely by provider.
- intermediate
- Concurrency limit
- The maximum simultaneous connections a plan permits — often the real ceiling on crawl throughput.
- intermediate
- Cookie warming
- Building plausible browsing history on a fresh profile before using it for its real purpose.
- advanced
- Cost per successful request
- Total spend divided by successful responses — the only price metric that survives contact with block rates.
- intermediate
D
- Datacenter proxy
- A proxy hosted in a commercial data centre, identifiable by its hosting ASN.
- beginner
E
- Ethical sourcing
- Obtaining pool bandwidth with informed, revocable consent and fair compensation.
- intermediate
G
H
- Headless browser
- A browser driven programmatically with no visible UI. Detectable unless deliberately masked.
- intermediate
K
- Kill switch
- A VPN client feature that blocks all traffic if the tunnel drops, preventing IP leaks.
- beginner
M
- MAP monitoring
- Watching resellers for minimum-advertised-price violations across regions.
- intermediate
- Mobile proxy
- A proxy that exits through a cellular carrier IP, typically shared by many subscribers via CGNAT.
- beginner
N
- No-logs policy
- A commitment not to retain connection or activity records. Only meaningful when independently audited.
- beginner
O
- OpenVPN
- The long-established open-source VPN protocol; slower than WireGuard but very widely supported.
- beginner
- Overage rate
- The per-unit price charged once a plan’s included allowance is exhausted, often several times the base rate.
- intermediate
P
- Price per GB
- Bandwidth-metered pricing. Comparable across providers only after normalising for included traffic and overage.
- beginner
R
- Residential proxy
- A proxy that routes traffic through an IP assigned by a consumer ISP to a real household connection.
- beginner
- Rotating proxy
- A proxy endpoint that assigns a different exit IP per request or on a fixed interval.
- beginner
S
- Scraper API
- A managed service that hides proxy rotation, retries and rendering behind one request.
- beginner
- SOCKS5
- A transport-agnostic proxy protocol supporting UDP and authentication, unlike plain HTTP proxying.
- intermediate
- Static ISP proxy
- A datacenter-hosted IP registered to a consumer ISP, combining residential trust with datacenter stability.
- intermediate
- Sticky session
- A proxy configuration that keeps the same exit IP for a bounded period so multi-step flows survive.
- beginner
- Subnet diversity
- How widely a pool spreads across distinct /24 blocks. Low diversity gets a whole pool banned at once.
- advanced
T
- TLS fingerprinting
- Identifying a client from its TLS handshake — JA3/JA4 — regardless of user agent.
- advanced
W
- WireGuard
- A modern VPN protocol with a small codebase and markedly better throughput than OpenVPN.
- beginner