Choosing proxies for X accounts

The proxy is the single highest leverage decision in a multi account setup. It is also where most of the money gets wasted, because the cheap option and the right option look identical on a pricing page.

The four types, and what each is for

Data centre

Cheap, fast, and identifiable. Hosting provider ranges are published and catalogued, so a site can tell that an address belongs to a server rather than a home. For scraping public pages this is irrelevant. For logging into accounts it is the thing that puts you in the suspicious pile before you have done anything.

Residential

Real addresses from real consumer connections, usually sold by the gigabyte. They look like what they are, which is the point. The two catches are that bandwidth pricing punishes a browser loading a real site all day, and that the pool is shared, so the address you get may carry someone else's history.

ISP, sometimes called static residential

Hosted in a data centre but registered to a consumer internet provider, so a lookup returns a residential provider. You get the speed and stability of hosting with the appearance of a home connection, and you usually get the address exclusively. For account work this is the best combination available, which is why it costs more per address.

Mobile

Carrier addresses, shared with large numbers of genuine phone users. That sharing is protective, because a carrier address with a lot of people behind it is normal. It is the most expensive option and usually the slowest. Worth it for accounts that need to survive unusual scrutiny, hard to justify for everything.

One proxy per account

This is the rule that matters more than the type. An account is linked to the addresses it logs in from. Two accounts sharing an address are visibly related. Five are a cluster.

The failure mode is specific and recognisable: everything works for weeks, one account gets actioned for an unrelated reason, and within a day or two the others on that address are locked as well. Operators describe this as losing accounts in batches, and shared addresses are usually why.

flottra assigns one proxy per account as the model rather than as a recommendation. Each account carries its own proxy and its own browser profile, and the browser launches with the two paired. Where that runs.

Where the addresses should be

Pick a country per account and stay in it. An account that connects from Germany for three weeks and then appears in Brazil has done something a real user rarely does, and it does it at exactly the moment you were hoping to go unnoticed.

Match the country to the account rather than to yourself. An account posting in English about a US market is unremarkable on a US address. The same account on a Vietnamese address is a small contradiction, and contradictions accumulate.

Then make the browser agree with the proxy. This is the step most people skip. If the proxy is in Germany and the browser reports the machine's own timezone and language, the account is describing two locations at once. Deriving timezone and locale from the proxy's geolocation removes the contradiction, and it is the kind of detail that costs nothing once it is automated and is tedious to maintain by hand across thirty accounts.

The leaks that undo a working proxy

A correctly configured proxy still leaves several ways for the real address or the real machine to show through.

• WebRTC. The browser API for peer to peer connections can enumerate the real local and public addresses from inside the page, bypassing the proxy entirely. This is the most common single leak. In Chrome it is closed by launching with --webrtc-ip-handling-policy=disable_non_proxied_udp, which is what flottra does on every launch.
• Timezone. Reported by JavaScript from the operating system, not from the network. Has to be set per profile to match the proxy.
• Language headers. Same problem. A German address sending an Accept-Language of Turkish is a mismatch.
• DNS. If lookups go out over your own connection rather than through the proxy, the resolver path tells a different story from the traffic.
• Proxy dropouts. When the proxy fails mid session, some setups fall straight through to the direct connection. That single request from your real address is worse than never having used a proxy. Check that your tooling fails closed.

Questions to ask before buying

1. Is the address exclusive to me? If it is shared, its history is shared.
2. How long does a session hold the same address? You want sticky sessions measured in hours at minimum, ideally an address that does not change at all.
3. Per IP or per GB? Per GB looks cheaper and often is not, for browser work.
4. Can I pick the country, and does it stay picked?
5. Can I test before committing? Buy one, run one account on it for a week, then buy the rest. The pool you get on a trial is sometimes not the pool you get at volume.

One check worth doing on any address before you trust an account to it: look it up in a couple of the public IP reputation databases and see whether it is already listed as a proxy or hosting address. If a free lookup can tell, so can X.

What this costs in practice

Proxies are usually the largest running cost in a multi account setup, and the budget is what forces the honest decision. At ten accounts, ISP proxies are affordable and worth it. At a hundred, the per address cost is the operating model, and it is worth asking whether a hundred accounts on good addresses beat two hundred on shared ones. They generally do, because the second group loses accounts continuously.

Notice which way the incentive runs when a service supplies the proxies. flottra deliberately does not sell them: your traffic goes through addresses you chose and can verify, not through a pool we control and profit from. That is also the only arrangement where the advice above is honest.

Once the addresses are right, the next two things that decide account survival are pace and content. Those are covered in why X accounts get suspended and what X automation can actually do. If you are still deciding whether the browser layer needs its own product, see do you need an antidetect browser for X accounts.