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Proxy glossary

What is proxy bandwidth metering?

Bandwidth metering is how a proxy provider counts the traffic it bills you for, usually in gigabytes.

Bandwidth metering explained

Also called traffic metering.

The question is which bytes count. Response bodies always do. Request bytes, headers, TLS handshakes and failed requests vary by provider, and on jobs with small pages those extras can be a large share of the bill.

A meter you can check lists each request with the bytes it was billed for, so you can total your own logs and compare. Without that, you are trusting one number on a dashboard.

Browsers move far more than you expect. Headless Chrome loading images, fonts and ad scripts can pull several times the bytes of a plain HTTP fetch of the same page.

For example

You plan 20,000 pages at 100 KB each, about 2 GB. Then Playwright loads every image and tracking script and the real figure is several times that. Block images and third-party scripts, or measure fifty pages before you top up.

How it works at ProxyMonkey

  • We bill request bytes plus response bytes, including headers and protocol overhead on the tunnelled connection. Connections that fail before transferring data are not billed. Retries you make are billed and show as separate entries.
  • Residential is metered per GB. On ISP and datacenter, dedicated and premium IPs have no traffic meter, and the shared plan includes 1 GB per IP with anything beyond it billed per GB under the same rule.
  • Every request is in your usage log, and the log exports as CSV.

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