Glossary · Networking
Subnet
A contiguous block of IP addresses managed as a unit, often shared reputation and all.
A subnet is a range of addresses that belong together, carved out of a larger allocation and administered as one block. Addresses in the same subnet usually share an owner, a location and, crucially, a reputation, because a site that distrusts one address in a range often distrusts the whole range.
This is why block-level thinking beats address-level thinking. If a provider announces a fresh subnet, every address in it starts with a clean slate; if a subnet has been abused, a new address inside it inherits the suspicion regardless of its own history.
For anyone evaluating proxy supply, subnet diversity is a quiet quality signal. A thousand addresses spread across many subnets are far more resilient than a thousand crammed into one, because the block is what gets blocked.
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