Active IPs vs Pool Size: The Proxy Metric Nobody Talks About
Every proxy provider loves to shout the same headline: “Millions of IPs!”Bright Data claims 72M+, Oxylabs lists 175M+, and the numbers keep inflating.Impressive? Maybe. Meaningful? Not really.
The truth is, total pool size is a marketing number. It tells you almost nothing aboutwhether you can scrape 200K pages tomorrow without hitting a wall. The metric that actually predicts success is active IP count — the number of addresses you can pull right now thatare online, unbanned, and not recycled by five other customers.
That’s why Ace Proxies puts live active IP stats front and center on your dashboard. No guessing. No blind trust.
Why “Pool Size” is a Vanity Stat
Dormant IPs pad the number — In residential pools, IPs come from end-user devices that may be offline half the time.
Shared subnets multiply risk — If a /24 block is hammered by multiple clients, bans cascade to everyone.
Rotation logic can kill performance — Even a 50M pool is worthless if you keep getting yesterday’s blocked IPs.
Pool size is the billboard: active, clean IPs are the engine.
How Ace Proxies Tracks Real IP Health
| Metric | What It Means | Why It Matters |
|---|---|---|
| Unique daily actives | IPs that served at least one request in the last 24 hours | Reveals true depth, not inflated totals |
| Subnet diversity | Distinct A, B, C network blocks | Limits collateral damage when a range is flagged |
| Ban rate per site | % of 403/429 responses | Lets you adjust tactics before a campaign collapses |
| Latency spread | 10th & 90th percentile ping times | Predicts scrape speed and helps tune concurrency |
These numbers refresh continuously. Before you launch a crawler, you know exactly how many U.S. residential, static ISP, or rotating datacenter IPs are ready for work.
Real-World Impact
E-commerce price monitoring
A major retailer pulls 200K U.S. product pages at dawn daily. With a “big pool” vendor, throughput tanked after day three as recycled IPs hit captchas. After switching to Ace’s 2M+ daily active residential IPs, ban rates fell under 1% and runtime dropped by 40% — retries simply vanished.
SEO rank tracking
An agency running 500K localized SERPs nightly used to rely on a pricey geo-API. With Ace’s static residential IPs spanning multiple /16 blocks, Google saw natural diversity — cutting costs to a fraction of their previous bill.
Choosing the Right Proxy Mix
- Rotating residential (per request) — Large-scale scraping where every hit needs to look like a unique user
- Static residential / ISP — Session-critical work: social media, limited-edition checkouts, ad verification
- Static datacenter — Raw speed at the lowest cost when bans are minimal and subnet spread is strong
Ace Proxies lets you blend all three in one dashboard — switch on the fly, no contract renegotiation.
Quick Checklist Before You Buy
- Ask for daily active IP stats, not just total pool size
- Verify subnet diversity — providers should show distinct /24 or /16 counts
- Check live ban rate reporting or run a 24-hour test
- Confirm dual authentication (IP allow-list + user:pass) for flexible setups
If a provider can’t give you this, you’re buying into marketing, not performance.
Bottom Line
Pool size might win headlines. Active, healthy IPs win data.
Ace Proxies makes the real numbers visible — unique daily actives, subnet spread, live ban rates — so your scraping, SEO, or market research pipelines stay open and on schedule.
Ready to see proof, not promises? Start a free test today and watch your Active IP counter climb in real time.