Glossary · Performance
Uptime
The share of time a proxy is actually reachable and working, which for residential pools is a live measurement rather than a guarantee.
Uptime is the fraction of the time a proxy actually answers. For fixed infrastructure, a datacenter or ISP address, it behaves like any server metric and stays high, because the machine is always on. A published figure there is a reasonable promise.
Residential pools are a different animal. Their addresses are real home and mobile connections that come and go as people use their devices, so uptime for a residential address is inherently a moving measurement, not a static guarantee, and any honest account of a residential pool talks about what is live now rather than a fixed number.
This is why continuous verification matters more than a headline. A pool advertised at some impressive availability means little if it is not being re-checked, and the useful question is not what a provider claims but how recently the specific addresses you are about to use were confirmed alive.
How HProxy handles it
Our network re-checks endpoints continuously precisely because residential uptime is a live fact, the number that matters is how many addresses are confirmed working right now, not a figure printed once.
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