Ports vs IPs
The network port on a provider's gateway that your client connects to. Providers often map each port to a different address or rotation behaviour.
Why it costs you money
Ports and addresses get quoted interchangeably and they are not the same thing. A plan sold as twenty ports may draw from a pool of millions of addresses, and a plan sold as twenty addresses gives you exactly twenty. Reading one as the other overstates or understates what you are buying by orders of magnitude.
See it in the data
Related terms
- Proxy poolThe set of addresses a provider can route you through. The advertised size is a vendor claim nobody outside can verify.
- BackconnectOne gateway address that fans out to the whole pool behind it, so your code never handles an address list.
- Concurrency limitThe cap on how many requests you can have in flight at once. Often the real constraint on a scraping job, not price.
- Per-IP pricingBilling per address rented per month, with traffic uncounted. It cannot be honestly converted to a per-GB rate.
- Every term we define