Proxy Bandwidth
The total amount of data (upload + download) transferred through a proxy connection, typically measured in GB.
Proxy bandwidth refers to the data volume transferred through proxy connections - the size of all requests sent and responses received. Providers measure bandwidth in GB and charge per GB for traffic-based plans.
What counts toward bandwidth: request headers and body (outbound), response headers and body (inbound). For web scraping, the response HTML is typically the largest component. Images, JavaScript, and CSS from page loads add significant volume if your scraper loads full pages.
To minimize bandwidth costs: scrape only the specific HTML you need (skip loading images and heavy resources), use Accept-Encoding: gzip to compress responses, and target specific API endpoints where available instead of full page loads.
Bandwidth-based pricing (per GB) versus IP-based pricing (per IP per month) suits different use cases. Per-GB pricing is efficient for scraping lightweight pages at high volume. Per-IP monthly pricing suits long-running sessions that transfer less total data but need consistent access.
Estimating your bandwidth needs: calculate average page size × number of requests per day. A typical e-commerce product page runs 50–200KB of HTML. 100,000 pages per day at 100KB average = 10GB per day.
What gets counted and when
Bandwidth in proxy billing means the volume of data moved through the proxy, counted in both directions. Your request headers count, the response headers count, and the body counts whether you parse it or throw it away.
That makes the unit of cost different from the unit of work. Two scrapers fetching the same thousand pages can differ fivefold in cost depending on whether they request compression and whether they download images.
Metered and unmetered products exist side by side because the underlying supply differs. Residential capacity is bought from device owners by volume. A datacenter address is a server with an uplink, so charging by traffic would be arbitrary.
Where we meter and where we do not
One product is metered, the rest are not:
Billing by product
Residential $1.00 per GB, both directions, headers included
ISP per address per month, traffic unmetered
Datacenter/IPv6 per address per month, traffic unmetered
Mobile per day, traffic unmetered on our side- Ask for gzip. Set Accept-Encoding: gzip and typical HTML arrives three to four times smaller, which is the single largest saving available.
- Block images, fonts and video in headless browsers. On a product page they carry most of the weight and none of the data.
- Fetch APIs instead of pages where one exists. A JSON response is often a tenth of the rendered page it comes from.
- Unused traffic does not expire while the package is active, so buying ahead costs nothing.
Bandwidth billing surprises
Headers count
On small API responses the headers can be a meaningful share of the bytes.
Failed requests count
A 403 still transferred a request and a response. Retrying a hard block in a loop is expensive.
Rendering costs more than fetching
A headless browser loads everything a browser loads unless you tell it not to.
Concurrency does not change the total
It changes how fast you spend the same amount.
Related terms
See this in practice
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