Proxy Uptime Guarantees Mislead: Hidden Costs in Web Scraping

A benchmark of three major proxy providers found that advertised 99.9% uptime doesn't translate to request success, with failure rates up to 30% on protected sites. Oxylabs achieved 91.4% success at 240ms, while SmartProxy lagged at 84.7% and 380ms. Hidden billing for failed requests can inflate costs, making cost-per-successful-request the true metric.