As of October 7, 2026, Shifter has the largest pool of live US IPs, more than Oxylabs and Bright Data, at a fraction of the cost.Shifter now has the largest pool of live US IPs

See benchmarks
Blog

Guides, Tutorials & Insights

Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.

Knowledge
Knowledge 9 min read

How to Use Residential Proxies in Node.js with Axios and Got

Proxies in Node.js: why Axios needs https-proxy-agent and proxy:false, Got's agent option, undici's ProxyAgent for fetch, and per-request geo rotation.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · July 29, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 10 min read

How to Scale Residential Proxy Scraping Workloads with Kubernetes

Run scraping on Kubernetes: proxy creds as Secrets, per-pod session identity via the Downward API, queue-driven autoscaling, and graceful shutdown.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · July 28, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 9 min read

How to Use Residential Proxies in PHP with cURL and Guzzle

Proxies in PHP: cURL's CURLOPT_PROXY and CURLOPT_PROXYUSERPWD, Guzzle's proxy option, CURLOPT_HTTPPROXYTUNNEL, and per-request geo rotation.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · July 26, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 9 min read

How to Use Residential Proxies in Java with OkHttp and Apache HttpClient

Proxies in Java: OkHttp's proxyAuthenticator gotcha, Apache HttpClient's default-5 per-route pool limit, entity consumption, and per-request geo rotation.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · July 25, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 9 min read

How to Use Residential Proxies in Go with net/http and Colly

Proxies in Go: transport setup, the body-drain and MaxIdleConnsPerHost gotchas that kill connection reuse, per-request geo rotation, and Colly's SetProxyFunc.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · July 24, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 10 min read

Why Your Residential Proxy Requests Are Timing Out

A diagnostic guide to proxy timeouts: connect vs read, over-tight geo filters, timeouts tuned for datacenter, and the checks that find the real cause fast.

Matt Brown Matt Brown · July 23, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 10 min read

Residential Proxy Failover: Building Reliable Multi-Region Data Pipelines

A retry handles a bad request. Failover handles a bad dependency. How to design proxy-backed pipelines that survive block waves, geo degradation, and outages.

Chris Collins Chris Collins · July 22, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 9 min read

Residential Proxies for Flight, Hotel and Travel-Fare Data Collection

Travel fares are point-of-sale priced, session-based, and perishable. Why accurate flight and hotel data collection depends on residential proxies, per market.

James Meadow James Meadow · July 21, 2026
Knowledge
Knowledge 11 min read

Residential Proxies and GDPR: A Compliance Overview

IP addresses can be personal data, and a proxy doesn't anonymise anything. The GDPR questions compliance teams should actually ask about residential proxies.

Matt Brown Matt Brown · July 20, 2026