Proxies, VPNs, and network setup for scraping.
How to pick a web scraping proxy in 2026: verified August prices per GB and per IP, datacenter vs ISP vs residential vs mobile, the session syntax vendors actually document, and what the NetNut seizure changed about buying residential IPs.
Route Selenium through a proxy in Chrome and Firefox, handle proxy authentication four ways now that selenium-wire is archived, and rotate at scale. Code written against Selenium 4.46.0, per-GB proxy prices read on 10 August 2026.
CyberGhost review with prices read from the vendor on 10 August 2026: $2.19 to $12.99 a month, a free browser-extension proxy with 8 servers in 4 countries, what the use agreement actually says about automation, and the arithmetic that rules a VPN out as a scraping proxy.
What HMA's scheduled IP change actually gives a crawler, checked in August 2026 against the vendor's own app listing: 100+ locations, five simultaneous devices, one address at a time. With per-GB proxy prices from five providers and the bandwidth arithmetic that decides between them.
NetNut.io review, rewritten after the takedown: five NetNut and Alarum domains now serve an FBI seizure notice, Google put the network at 2 million devices and 316 threat clusters in a single June week, and Alarum cut about a third of its staff on 13 July 2026.
Building a residential proxy scraper on Bright Data (ex-Luminati): the current brd.superproxy.io:44445 endpoint, the KYC review that gates residential zones created after 7 July 2026, per-GB prices read on 13 August 2026, and the point where Web Unlocker gets cheaper than raw proxies.
Measure proxy latency, success rate and throughput yourself: a curl timing breakdown, a Python harness that tells proxy faults from target faults, and the August 2026 figures vendors and independent testers publish.
Open proxy lists are mostly dead hardware and stolen routers: on 13 August 2026 one long-running list showed 401 working addresses out of 5,384, half of them transparent. What detects them, what replaced them, and verified August 2026 prices per gigabyte for directory crawls.
Free vs paid proxies for web scraping, rewritten around the seizures: 911 S5, Operation Moonlander, BADBOX 2.0, IPIDEA and NetNut. Verified August 2026 prices per gigabyte, a live reading of one public proxy list, and why the free/paid line is not the one that decides anything.