United Kingdom proxies
Britain is one of the few markets where all four of our address types are available at once, which makes it a good place to explain the choice rather than just sell one. It is also the market where the most people get their first request wrong, because the country code is GB and almost everybody types UK. That is the first thing on this page for a reason.
What we have in the United Kingdom
All four types are available here. Prices are identical to every other country: London does not carry a surcharge.
UK retail, local pricing, anything filtering hosting ranges
Accounts that must hold one British address for months
Volume scraping where the target does not check address class
Platforms that expect a carrier address
What British addresses get used for
Retail price monitoring
Amazon.co.uk, Argos, Currys, John Lewis, Tesco, ASOS: these serve British visitors their own catalogue and refuse or challenge hosting ranges, so they need a British residential address.
Local search and SEO
google.co.uk, the local map pack and paid placements. British results diverged from Irish and EU ones.
Ad verification
The Guardian, Daily Mail, The Sun, Sky News: campaigns bought for a British audience render only for one.
Limited releases and resale
Release windows, raffles and stock allocation are country-specific, and a foreign address is excluded before anything else is checked.
What looks different from outside the United Kingdom
These serve a British visitor something other than what a foreign one sees, because of broadcast rights and licensing. We sell addresses rather than a way past detection, and no provider controls what a given platform decides.
Which type to take for a British job
Addresses in British datacenters, traffic unmetered, London routes are fast.
Volume collection, APIs, targets that ignore address class
Home connection addresses, billed per gigabyte, rotating by default.
Retail pricing, google.co.uk results, ad checks
Consumer registration on datacenter hardware. Static and dedicated for the term.
Accounts, long sessions, identities that must hold one address
A carrier address behind NAT, shared with real subscribers.
Social platforms and apps that expect a phone
Cities people ask for here
Cities are set with the _city_ suffix. London dominates both residential density and datacenter capacity; the rest are thinner and fail more often.
The setups people take here most often
- 01Static ISP, LondonAccounts and long-lived identities: one British address for the whole term.
- 02Rotating residential, country levelRetail pricing and search results: a new exit per connection.
- 03Datacenter, LondonVolume jobs where the target does not filter hosting ranges.
- 04Mobile addressPlatforms expecting carrier traffic. The operator is chosen in the dashboard.
The country code is GB, not UK
This is the single most common failed first request on British addresses, so it goes first rather than in a troubleshooting section at the bottom.
ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 assigns GB to the United Kingdom. UK exists in the standard only as an exceptionally reserved code, and our gateway does not accept it. A login carrying _c_UK does not error in a way that says so: the suffix simply fails to parse, and you get plain rotation with an exit somewhere else entirely. Your requests succeed, your data is from the wrong country, and nothing warns you.
The habit worth building is to assert the country in code rather than trusting the string you typed. One extra request at the start of a job catches this in seconds; a dataset silently collected from the wrong country catches it a week later.
The mistake and the fix
# WRONG: parses as no country at all, you get rotation
curl -x login_c_UK:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://ipinfo.io/json
# RIGHT
curl -x login_c_GB:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://ipinfo.io/json
# London, held for fifteen minutes on session 42
curl -x login_c_GB_city_London_s_42_ttl_15m:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# assert before you store anything
# if the country in the response is not GB, stop the jobWhy people ask for British addresses
Three groups, wanting different things from the same country.
The first is retail. British catalogues and offers diverged from EU ones after Brexit, so a German or Irish address no longer returns what a British visitor sees. Anyone covering Europe now needs a British exit rather than a nearby one.
The second is account work on platforms with a large British user base. A British consumer address is unremarkable, which is what accounts need. The same platforms treat a London hosting range very differently.
The third is infrastructure. London is a major peering point, and British datacenter capacity is fast and cheap. Teams pick it for latency, not to look British, and for that purpose the address class matters not at all.
What breaks without a British address
Most of the web does not care. The parts that do fall into a short list, and knowing which one you face decides how much you need to spend.
- Retail and price comparison. British catalogues differ from EU ones, and some retailers refuse foreign traffic at the checkout step rather than on the product page, so a foreign exit looks fine until the run reaches the part you cared about.
- Betting and gambling. UK-licensed operators geo-restrict aggressively and check far more than the address, because their licence depends on it.
- Streaming and broadcast. British catalogues are separate, and these platforms invest heavily in detecting proxies of every type.
- Advertising. Campaigns bought for a British audience only render for one, which is the whole basis of ad verification here.
- Limited product drops. Release windows, raffles and stock allocation are frequently country-specific, and a foreign address is often excluded before anything else is checked.
Cities: London, and then a drop
City targeting works the same way as everywhere: _city_London before the session suffix, hyphens instead of spaces.
What is worth knowing about Britain specifically is how uneven the distribution is. London dominates both residential device density and datacenter capacity by a wide margin. Manchester, Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds and Edinburgh are all real and all thinner, and a city request for a smaller one fails more often simply because fewer devices are online there at any moment.
For most British work this does not matter. A Manchester address and a London address look equally British to a retailer, and country-level targeting is both more reliable and cheaper to operate. Reach for city targeting when the thing you are measuring is genuinely local, such as regional delivery estimates or local search results, and write a country-level fallback for when it is unavailable.
Choosing the type for a British target
Run it in this order. Ten minutes here replaces a month of guessing, and Britain is one of the few countries where every option is actually on the table.
- Start on datacenter. If the target serves you normally, stop: $1.15 per address per month with unmetered traffic beats everything else for volume, and London capacity is fast.
- A 403 on the first request means hosting ranges are filtered. Move that domain to residential and leave the rest.
- A 429 after many requests is a rate limit, not a block. It wants more addresses, not a different type.
- Anything that logs into an account and stays logged in belongs on ISP. Static, dedicated, British consumer registration, and it does not move under you.
- If the platform expects a phone, take mobile. A British carrier address is shared with real subscribers, which is exactly why platforms treat it gently.
Limited drops and resale, honestly
Britain is one of the larger markets for limited releases, and it is the reason a good share of the people reading this page are here at all. It is worth being straight about what a proxy does and does not do for that.
What it does: gives each of your sessions a separate British address, so a site that limits by address does not see one visitor making forty attempts. That is real and it is necessary.
What it does not do: make forty sessions look like forty different people. The address is one signal. Browser fingerprints, payment details, delivery addresses, account age and behaviour all carry more weight on these platforms, and the ones that matter have spent years on exactly this problem. Anyone selling proxies as the answer to limited drops is selling you a component and calling it a solution.
The practical setup is one ISP address per identity for anything long-lived, or a mobile address where the platform expects carrier traffic. Rotating residential is the wrong tool here: an address that changes mid-session looks worse than a foreign one that stays put.
Betting and gambling sites
A large British vertical, and one where the address is the least of it.
Operators licensed by the UK regulator carry obligations around who they let play, so their checks go well past geography: identity documents, payment instrument country, device consistency and behavioural signals. A British address is necessary to be considered and nowhere near sufficient to pass.
We sell addresses. We do not sell a way around identity verification, and a provider promising one is describing something they cannot deliver. If your work here is legitimate, such as affiliate compliance checks or verifying that your own campaign renders correctly, a British residential or mobile address is the right building block and the rest is your own setup.
Mobile addresses in the United Kingdom
British mobile is available and behaves like mobile everywhere: the modem sits behind carrier-grade NAT alongside real subscribers, so the address is shared with people using the same operator. That sharing is precisely what buys the tolerance, because a platform banning the address bans paying customers along with you.
Rotation is a physical reconnect rather than a routing decision, so it takes seconds, and the operator pool is small enough that the same address sometimes returns. Operator selection is available, and the operators you can actually pick are listed in the dashboard. Trust that list rather than any list on a marketing page, including this one.
At $5.76 per day this is the most expensive way to hold a British address. It earns that only when the target specifically expects carrier traffic.
What a month of British work costs
Three realistic workloads at our prices, so you can check any quote you are given.
- Price monitoring across British retailers, 50,000 product pages a day with images blocked, roughly 80 KB per page. That is 4 GB a day, about 120 GB a month, so $120 on residential. If the retailers tolerate hosting ranges, ten datacenter addresses do the same job for $13.50.
- Ad verification for UK campaigns, 200 placements a day at about 400 KB each. Under 2.5 GB a month, so under three dollars of traffic. The proxy is not the cost here and never was.
- Twenty British accounts kept warm all month on ISP addresses at $2.10 each on the volume tier: $42 a month, with no traffic billing at all. The same work on residential would cost more and serve the accounts worse.
Mistakes specific to Britain
Beyond the GB code, these are the ones that come up.
- Sending en-US from a British address. Many sites will serve you the American variant happily, so your scrape captures US spelling, US units and sometimes US pricing. Send en-GB when you want what a British visitor sees.
- Getting the timezone wrong. Britain runs on GMT in winter and BST in summer, so a profile hardcoded to UTC is right half the year and contradicts itself the other half. Use Europe/London and let the library handle the switch.
- Treating Britain and Ireland as one market. Different currency, different VAT, different catalogues and different platforms. An Irish address is not a British one.
- Reusing an Irish address for British targets. Ireland is a separate country with its own results and its own catalogues, and a British site will treat an Irish exit as foreign. The two are not interchangeable at any level.
- Country selection in a dashboard that lists England. Supplier catalogues sometimes label the country England rather than United Kingdom. It is the same inventory; the code in the login string is still GB.
Connection strings for the United Kingdom
Targeting rides in the login, in the order country, city, session, lifetime. Static British addresses take no suffixes at all: the host is the IP from your dashboard, port 50100, SOCKS5 on 50101.
British exits, four ways
curl -x login_c_GB:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# London, sticky for an hour, for an antidetect profile
curl -x login_c_GB_city_London_s_1001_ttl_1h:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org
# a British static address: no suffixes
curl -x login:password@YOUR-GB-IP:50100 https://api.ipify.org
# SOCKS5 with remote DNS so the lookup is British too
curl -x socks5h://login_c_GB:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.orgSetting it up in the tools people actually use
The same login string in three shapes, with the British settings that have to agree with it.
Britain in an antidetect browser, in Python and in Playwright
# Antidetect profile
Type: HTTP or SOCKS5
Host: proxy.sotaproxy.com
Port: 10000
Login: YOUR_LOGIN_c_GB_s_1001_ttl_1h
Password: YOUR_PASSWORD
Timezone: Europe/London Language: en-GB
# Python
import requests
url = "http://YOUR_LOGIN_c_GB_s_7_ttl_15m:YOUR_PASSWORD@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000"
r = requests.get("https://example.co.uk", proxies={"http": url, "https": url},
headers={"Accept-Language": "en-GB,en;q=0.9", "Accept-Encoding": "gzip"},
timeout=30)
# Playwright: locale and timezone must match the exit
ctx = browser.new_context(
proxy={"server": "http://proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000",
"username": "YOUR_LOGIN_c_GB_s_3_ttl_1h",
"password": "YOUR_PASSWORD"},
locale="en-GB", timezone_id="Europe/London")The legal part, stated plainly
Since Brexit the United Kingdom runs its own data protection regime rather than the EU GDPR, overseen by the Information Commissioner. The obligations are similar in shape and differ in detail, and collecting data that identifies people in Britain brings you under it regardless of where your company sits.
Routing through a British address does not establish you in Britain and does not change which rules apply to your dataset. 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 rather than a proxy provider.
Verifying a British exit
Under a minute, and it catches the two failures that waste the most time here: the GB code typed as UK, and a sticky session that is quietly rotating.
Three checks
# 1. is the exit actually British
curl -x login_c_GB:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://ipinfo.io/json
# 2. does the sticky session hold: three identical answers means yes
for i in 1 2 3; do
curl -s -x login_c_GB_s_42_ttl_15m:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.org; echo
done
# 3. does DNS resolve on our side (socks5h, not socks5)
curl -x socks5h://login_c_GB:password@proxy.sotaproxy.com:10000 https://api.ipify.orgQuestions people ask before buying British addresses
Why does _c_UK not work?
Because the ISO code for the United Kingdom is GB. UK is only an exceptionally reserved code and our gateway does not accept it. A malformed suffix does not error loudly: it falls back to plain rotation, so you get a working request from the wrong country.
Do you have all four types in Britain?
Yes. Residential, ISP, datacenter and mobile are all available, which is not true of every country we cover.
Can I get a London address specifically?
Usually. London has by far the highest device density in the country. Smaller cities fail more often, so write a country-level fallback rather than assuming a city is always there.
Will a British proxy get me into a limited drop?
It will stop a site from seeing one address make forty attempts, which is necessary. It will not make forty sessions look like forty people: fingerprints, payment details and delivery addresses carry more weight. Anyone promising otherwise is selling you a component and calling it a solution.
Do British addresses cost more than other countries?
No. Prices are the same everywhere: residential from $1.00 per GB, datacenter from $1.15 per address per month, ISP from $1.90, mobile from $5.76 per day.
Why does my supplier list say England instead of United Kingdom?
Some catalogues label it that way. It is the same inventory, and the code in your login string is GB either way.