HTTP & HTTPS Proxies

How an HTTP proxy works

An HTTP proxy sits between your client and the website. Your client sends the request to the proxy, the proxy forwards it and returns the response. For HTTPS pages, the client asks the proxy to open a tunnel with a CONNECT request, and the encrypted traffic then passes through untouched. The proxy sees the destination host, not the page content.

This is why one HTTP proxy address is enough for both http:// and https:// URLs. The “HTTPS proxy” in many tools simply means an HTTP proxy that is used for HTTPS sites.

Set up an HTTP proxy

• Browsers and extensions: enter host, port, username and password in the proxy settings.
• curl: curl -x http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT https://api.ipify.org.
• Python requests: pass proxies={"http": url, "https": url} with url = "http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT".
• Scraping frameworks such as Scrapy, Playwright and Puppeteer all accept a proxy URL in the same format.

More detail, including system-wide setup on Windows and macOS, is in the guide how to set up a proxy.

Choosing the right IP behind the proxy

The protocol is only the doorway. What decides whether a request succeeds is the IP behind it. Residential proxies use IPs from real ISP networks and are the default for scraping and local checks. Mobile proxies exit through 3G, 4G and 5G carriers and are useful when a target is strict. ISP proxies are static addresses for long sessions.

If you are unsure, start with a small residential package and test your target. Prices start at $3.50/GB for 1 GB and fall to $1.80/GB on large packages.