Glossary · Proxy types
Proxy pool
The full set of IP addresses a provider can route you through, and the number behind a rotating proxy.
A proxy pool is the collection of addresses a provider draws from. When you use a rotating proxy, you are not renting a specific IP, you are renting access to the pool, and the gateway hands you a different member of it per request or per session.
Pool size is the number providers advertise most loudly and the one worth reading most carefully. A large pool spreads traffic thinner and offers more geographic choice, but a headline count says nothing about how many of those addresses are alive and clean right now, which is what actually determines whether a request succeeds.
The honest way to size a pool is by what is live, not what is claimed. An address that existed once but is offline today contributes to the headline and nothing to your success rate.
How HProxy handles it
We verify the pool continuously and report what is live rather than a peak historical count, because the gap between a claimed pool and a working one is exactly where a proxy purchase goes wrong.
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