South Africa proxies
South Africa has a feature nothing else in our coverage does: the availability of part of the home pool depends on the electricity supply, and outages run by district on a published schedule. This is not a rare fault but a recurring mode, and a pipeline that reads those drops as blocking will be wrong systematically.
What we have in South Africa
Prices are the same as in every other country we cover.
What South African addresses get used for
Retail price monitoring
Takealot, Makro, Game, Checkers, Woolworths, Pick n Pay: storefronts are only visible from inside the country.
Classifieds and second-hand
Gumtree, bidorbuy, Cars.co.za, AutoTrader: local platforms with local prices.
Property
Property24 and Private Property: the rental market in the large cities needs regular passes.
Local search and ad verification
google.co.za, News24, IOL, TimesLive: campaigns are bought for the local audience.
What looks different from outside South Africa
These serve a South African visitor something other than what a foreign one sees, because of broadcast rights and local catalogues. We sell addresses rather than a way past detection.
Which type to take for a South African job
Home connection addresses, billed per gigabyte, rotating by default. A sticky session holds one address for up to fifty minutes.
Marketplaces, retail, search results, ad checks
Addresses in South African datacenters, traffic unmetered.
Volume collection where the target ignores address class
Cities people ask for here
Cities are set with the _city_ suffix. Johannesburg with Pretoria, plus Cape Town, carry most of the pool, and the rest is noticeably thinner.
The setups people take here most often
- 01Residential with tolerance for dropsThe default: retries and long timeouts are mandatory.
- 02Datacenter for neutral targetsPublishers and reference sites are served normally and run more evenly over time.
- 03A fifty minute sticky sessionWith a caveat: it can end through no fault of the target.
- 04A schedule with windowsPasses are planned so a retry lands in a different part of the day.
Connection strings for South Africa
The country code is ZA, upper case. The city goes after it with _city_, hyphens instead of spaces, in the order country, city, session, lifetime.
South African static addresses take no suffixes: the host is the IP from your dashboard, port 50100, SOCKS5 on 50101.
South African exits, four ways
curl -x login_c_ZA:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# a longer timeout, which is the local default rather than a precaution
curl --max-time 30 -x login_c_ZA:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# Cape Town explicitly, when regions are being compared
curl -x login_c_ZA_city_Cape-Town_s_42_ttl_15m:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# a South African static address: no suffixes
curl -x login:password@YOUR-ZA-IP:50100 https://api.ipify.orgThe pool here depends on the power supply
The main local feature, and it is technical rather than commercial.
Scheduled power cuts recur here, running by district on an announced timetable. While a district is without power its home connections drop out, and part of the pool becomes temporarily unavailable. This is neither a provider fault nor a block from the target.
What follows for your pipeline. First: dropped connections and timeouts here cannot be read automatically as a sign that you were noticed. Logic that marks a target hostile on timeout and switches address type will keep making the wrong call.
Second: a sticky session can end mid-run through no fault of the target. If your scenario has several steps, make it survive an address change halfway, or restart it from the beginning rather than continuing from a new point.
Third, on scheduling: spread retries across hours rather than minutes, so the retry lands in a different window. A thirty second retry into a district without power achieves nothing.
And fourth, practically: datacenter addresses are not subject to this, because facilities run backup power. Where the job does not require a home address, datacenter has an extra argument here that it does not have elsewhere.
South Africa is not "Africa"
The second thing, and it is about how the result gets labelled.
A South African address gets bought as an "African" one, with continental coverage implied. It does not work that way. South Africa is its own market with its own platforms, prices and search results, and data from here describes it rather than its neighbours.
The difference is not cosmetic. Catalogues, logistics, common payment methods and the shape of demand vary more between countries on this continent than they do within Europe. A report where a South African slice is labelled regional misleads whoever makes decisions from it.
The correct label is simple: this is South Africa. If you need neighbouring markets, those are separate jobs rather than a wider sample.
Where a South African exit genuinely works as a regional point is in checking content delivery: many services serve the south of the continent from facilities in this country, so response times from here are indicative for the neighbours even when the catalogue is indicative only for South Africa.
What actually blocks you on South African targets
The familiar split, with the amendment from the section above.
Marketplaces and the large chains filter hosting ranges: expect a 403 from datacenter and plan for residential.
Publishers and government sites serve datacenter addresses normally.
Search results are reachable but rate limited per address: more addresses rather than a different type.
The main difference from other countries: a timeout here is not evidence of blocking. Separate refusals carrying a status code from drops without one in your logs, or your blocking statistics will be inflated.
Which exits you get here, and how stable they are
The South African pool in practical terms.
The pool is decent in size: a country of over sixty million people, but unevenly distributed. Gauteng with Johannesburg and Pretoria, plus Cape Town, carry most of it.
Response times from Europe and North America are noticeably longer than within those regions: the country is far away and traffic runs over subsea routes. Thirty seconds is the minimum timeout here rather than a margin.
Connection stability is below the average of our coverage, for the reason described above. Build retries into the architecture rather than into client settings.
Sticky sessions hold an address for up to fifty minutes if nothing drops. Default rotation changes the address on every request.
Choosing the type for a South African target
The usual order, with a local amendment at the end.
- Start with a South African datacenter address: $1.15 per address per month. On publishers and reference sites that is enough, and it runs more evenly over time.
- A 403 on the first request means hosting ranges are filtered. Move to country-level residential.
- If the job has to run on one address, add a sticky session, but design the scenario to survive it ending.
- A 429 after many requests is a per-address rate limit: more addresses, not a different type.
- Treat a timeout with no status code as infrastructure rather than defence: retry later instead of switching address type.
What South African sites check beyond the address
A South African address opens the first gate; language and number parsing decide the rest.
Send en-ZA. The country has many official languages, but the commercial web runs predominantly in English and full catalogues in the others are rare.
The number format is inconsistent: both 1 299,90 and 1,299.90 occur, sometimes on adjacent pages of one site. Do not assume a single template for the country; pin the format per domain and range-check the result.
The currency is the rand, written R before the number.
The time zone is UTC+2 with no daylight saving, one zone for the whole country.
What a month of South African work costs
Three scenarios at our prices, so you have something to check a quote against.
- Price monitoring across South African retail, 20,000 listings a day with images blocked, roughly 110 KB per page. That is about 2.2 GB a day, around 66 GB a month: $66 on residential.
- Budget fifteen to twenty percent on top for retries: some requests here have to be made twice for reasons unrelated to the targets.
- If the targets are neutral, the same collection on ten datacenter addresses costs $13.50 a month and runs more evenly.
The legal part, stated plainly
South Africa is not in the European Union, and GDPR does not apply here directly. Its own personal information protection legislation does, with its own regulator, and collecting data that identifies people in South Africa is governed by it regardless of where your company sits.
This is general information rather than legal advice. Our terms require lawful use and we act on abuse reports. Where the answer carries commercial risk, ask a lawyer.
Verifying a South African exit
Under a minute. The third command is the most useful one here: it shows the failure rate, which is worth knowing in advance rather than discovering in production.
Three checks
# 1. is the exit South African, and where
curl -s --max-time 30 -x login_c_ZA:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://ipinfo.io/json
# 2. what the round trip actually costs from here
curl -o /dev/null -s --max-time 30 -w "ZA: %{time_total}s\n" -x login_c_ZA:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# 3. how many of twenty attempts come back
ok=0
for i in $(seq 1 20); do
curl -s --max-time 30 -o /dev/null -x login_c_ZA:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org && ok=$((ok+1))
done
echo "$ok/20"Questions people ask before buying South African addresses
Why do connections drop more often than usual?
Part of the home pool depends on the electricity supply, and outages run by district on a schedule. That is infrastructure rather than a block from the target.
How should retries be configured?
Spread them across hours rather than seconds so they land in a different window, and separate status-code refusals from bare drops in your logs.
Does a South African address cover Africa?
No. It is its own market with its own platforms and prices. Neighbouring countries are separate jobs rather than a wider sample.
Why are response times high?
The country is far from Europe and North America and traffic runs over subsea routes. Thirty seconds is the minimum timeout here.
Why does my price parser break between pages?
The number format is inconsistent here and both separator styles occur. Pin the format per domain and range-check the result.
Do South African addresses cost more?
No. Prices are the same everywhere: residential from $1.00 per GB, datacenter from $1.15 per address per month.