Open Proxies API

You may have heard that free open proxies are unreliable and not to be trusted. And that finding useful open proxies is its own challenge. Or have you already experienced the downsides on your own? If so, you know it’s true. But there are ways to use open proxies in a more reliable and secure manner. Our Open Proxies API offers a great way.

You Need Frequent Updates

New open proxies can come online at any time. You need the latest lists of open proxy IPs & ports. To get them, you need to regularly download or scrape public lists of open proxies.

But which lists are reliable? How much work is it to get those public lists into a simple IP:Port file for your software?

And of course you can’t assume that everything published is still working. Often, you don’t know when those lists were last updated. So you have to test everything you get.

You Need Frequent Testing

Testing your open proxies list frequently is a must, because open proxies can die at any time. When proxies die, your requests will start failing. And you don’t just want to check that they are up, you also need confirm that:

  1. your requests succeed in a reasonable amount of time
  2. your requests have not been modified in transit
  3. no malicious code has been inserted in the response

The best way to do this is to have a piece of content you control on a remote server, then check that requests through each proxy return that content unmodified, without timing out or taking too long.

Review the Requirements

So let’s review what’s required to use free open proxies in a reliable manner:

  • Find reliable sources for open proxy lists
  • Download or scrape frequently from those sources
  • Check whether each proxy is up
  • Set up a file on a remote server for testing
  • Regularly test that each proxy can fetch that file in a reasonable amount of time, and does not modify the content

That’s a lot of work! What if someone could do all this for you?

Open Proxies API can!

Try ProxyMesh Open Proxies API

The ProxyMesh Open Proxies API does all of the above. All you have to do is download 1 list of open proxies from our single, reliable API. Here’s what ProxyMesh does:

  • Downloads & scrapes over 1,000 open proxy IPs from 11 free open proxy lists
  • Tests all proxies every 15 minutes for speed and reliability
  • Confirms that no malicious code is inserted in responses
  • Checks that all proxies respond within 8 seconds

After this process, about 200-400 IPs meet acceptance criteria. These IPs are then published to the Open Proxies API for your use, in a simple proxy list format usable by nearly all scraping software tools.

Paid plans start at $10/month. And ProxyMesh offers a free plan so you can confirm for yourself how it easy it is to use before you sign up. There are many code samples for 15 different programming languages and tools.

If you want to simplify your life, sign up for the Open Proxies API today!

And check out ProxyMesh too!