I use what https://www.pingproxies.com/ calls ISP Proxies, which I think is just them reselling a /22 they got from Charter. Definitely aren't botnet proxies because they have 100% uptime. Duly noted about VPNs though! I would imagine Reddit is more VPN tolerant than most sites.
Thanks for the tip. Didn't know these were a thing. Have you done any research into them? It seems like with these sorts of ventures a lowly techie like myself doesn't have a lot of ways to validate if what they say in their marketing is actually true.
I did a whois on the IPs I was given and found they were owned by one ISP and were all in a similar range so there's that. A lot of ISPs (especially T-Mobile) lease IP space out like this too: https://rasbora.dev/blog/detecting-residential-proxy-network.... I would probably be paying a lot less if they were unethically sourced.
In general, if a provider advertises a 5-figure-IP-sized "pool" of IPs with a guaranteed number of "ports" (simultaneous connections), then the operator is almost certainly someone looking to monetize a botnet. Usually the cheapest plan would be something like pool of 20000 IPs - 500 connections, with the number of connections maxing out at 1/4-1/2 of the total IPs due to diurnal dynamics (people in major botnet victim countries like India/China often turn off their routers every night). Also advertising really specific geotargeting is often a sign that they are marketing to carders. The Krebs articles about awmproxy/TDSS are pretty good if you enjoy reading about this kind of thing :)
Tim, Managing Director at Ping Proxies here. You're correct - we work with various ISPs including AT&T, Comcast, Spectrum and a bunch of others.
We announce IP blocks with their residential connectivity and have proxies that benefit from datacenter uptime/connectivity while also looking like they're real residential connections.
We currently manage 50,000+ proxies in this configuration.
The downsides over having a peer network are that fixed costs are much more expensive and locations are limited - we have London, Berlin, Ashburn and New York while peer networks have basically every city on the planet but one of the largest benefits is the ethical nature of our product and the compliance that brings.
Let me know if you have any questions at all and thanks for supporting us!
Brian’s newsletter is one of the few I actually subscribe to. Thank you for these links. From the posts it actually looks like you’d probably pay more if they were botnet shenanigan’s.
