Today we've launched a new version of our status page designed to convey more relevant data to you and to make the status page itself more resilient and accessible in emergencies.

So first of all, the page has a brand new address, previously our status page was at proxycheck.io/status which meant it could potentially become inaccessible if our entire website were to be down. This has now been changed to status.proxycheck.io which as a sub-domain can be operated independently of our normal service cluster.

The second big change is we now show status history. The image above illustrates the new pill-style history graph showcasing the past 3-day status of our API in increments of one hour. Each pill can show multiple colors at once with the size of the color indicating the service status and how long that status occurred. When hovering your cursor over a pill you'll receive an interface similar to the one on the right below featuring current status, latency and any specific service messages.

On the left above you can also see smaller status panels for specific server nodes. If you view the new status page you'll actually notice that the most important statuses are at the top and shown larger with more visible history and as we get down to the less important things like individual service nodes we display them more densely.

You may also notice that some services not relevant to customers have been replaced on the new status page with more appropriate services such as email services and the Custom List downloader service.

One last thing to mention about the design is that all the displayed dates and times are localised to you as and when you view the page making it much simpler to determine when events occurred without needing to look at unfamiliar timezones.

Before we decided to make our status page (absolutely everything about this feature is custom) we looked at many commercial and open-source solutions and although many of them could accomplish what we needed none of them fit the design aesthetic of our website or they didn't display the exact information we needed in the way we wanted it shown.

That's why we chose to design this ourselves, the flexibility that building things yourself affords can not be overlooked and that extends to even small things like making sure the hover-tooltip stays on the screen when you get near a browser window edge which was something we found even some commercial status products didn't offer.

So that's the update for today we hope you enjoy the new status page and will bookmark it for your convenience and as always have a wonderful week!

Today we've made two changes to the service the first of which helps developers get started with our API faster by expanding the test console found in our API documentation to actually generate a URL for you to query based on the flags you enable. Below is a screenshot showing the new interface, the purple section being completely new.

We've also removed the submit button that used to accompany the test console because it was redundant, instead we now dynamically update both the output example and the new URL generator section as you toggle flags on and off or change the type of request being tested from one of the supplied dropdowns.

The second change we've made today is we've increased the storage available for Custom Lists from 4MB to 8MB as illustrated below.

We've made this change because users are making use of larger and larger lists and we want to facilitate this usage. Some users have resorted to breaking up large lists into multiple lists which just seemed inefficient. We ran some test to determine the performance impact on the API and didn't see any degradation, we may increase individual list sizes again in the future but right now we felt 8MB struck the right balance.

So those are the updates for today we hope you're having a wonderful week and thanks for reading!

Since we introduced operator data to the API in December 2021 we've often been asked by customers to broaden the types of operators that we support and generally expand on the feature. To deliver on those requests we showed last year how we had been adding decentralised VPN operators and then a month later we integrated operator data into the positive detection log within customer dashboards.

Today we're improving operator data again by building operator profiles for scraping services. We've been monitoring many of these services since last year and we feel now is the right time to create distinct operator cards and expose operator data within our API for these organisations.

Above is one such card for Oxylabs which is one of the largest operators in the scraping and residential proxy selling space. You'll also find cards for their many competitors of all sizes.

Broadening the kinds of operators we list doesn't stop here; we will start to include datacenter hosts, residential proxy sellers, click farming services and more in future updates, we are committed to expanding our operator data with the rich cards like the one above and detailed and easy to parse data exposed through our API.

That's all for today, thanks for reading – we hope you have a great week!

Today we've added a new feature to the latest version of our API called Hash-based Message Authentication Code or appreviated HMAC which makes it possible for you to verify our JSON payloads by hashing them and then comparing the resultant hash to the one supplied by us in a new header alongside our API results.

Below is how the shared key appears within the customer dashboard, to use this feature you would visit your dashboard and copy your unique HMAC key to your software and then perform a SHA-256 hash against our JSON payloads while using this shared key.

The new header where our hashes will be available is called http_x_signature and you'll only find it presented in our API results if you're making your query via TLS (HTTPS) and have visited your dashboard since this feature was added so that you can retrieve your unique HMAC key.

Whilst we are confident that none of our results are manipulated on route to you when using our encrypted TLS endpoint this expands upon that security for those with an elevated threat model.

That's the update for today, we will be updating our official PHP library to take advantage of this feature in the near future.

Today we're excited to announce our new Account Activity Log feature. This tool provides a detailed record of all actions performed within your account, enhancing both transparency and security.

What does the Account Activity actually Log?

The Account Activity Log keeps track of all activities related to your proxycheck.io account. From logins and password changes to adjusting custom rules and lists, or even changing email preferences, every action is documented. This feature ensures you have a clear overview of your account activity.

Below is a screenshot showing a small example of some events, with the launch 50 different events will be recorded here and we'll add more as new features launch.

How to Access

Log into your proxycheck.io dashboard and click on the new account activity button found in the top right of the settings tab. Here, you can view all recorded events starting from today in an organized manner.

Looking Ahead

The Account Activity Log is part of our ongoing effort to enhance your account security and control. We've also today added location data to the login emails you receive which will enhance account security.

Thanks for reading and we hope you're having a wonderful week!

Today we've updated the graphs you'll find within your dashboard's stats tab to further break out the detection types shown to now include blacklisted entries and those triggered by a custom rule.

This change was made based on user feedback and it brings some much-needed consistency to the stats tab as you could previously only see blacklisted and custom rule entries in your positive detection log and active tag list but not in the graphs.

Below is how the new bar graphs look with the added data.

Within the bar graphs, we're also further breaking out blacklisted entries into their own bars for both IP addresses and email addresses. Currently, custom rules are not supported for disposable email checking which is why there's no separate entry for those at this time.

And below is how the new line graph looks, we've also now locked the colors which are used to represent specific data points so they're consistent between loads even if one or more pieces of data are absent.

To have your data populate for these new graphs you'll need to be using the latest version of our API dated the 22nd of January 2024. We've also updated the Dashboard APIs to make this data available there too. We know for some of you this has been a very desired feature and we're happy to oblige as the inconsistency between the graphs and logs had been overlooked for far too long.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful weekend!

Today we've expanded the information we expose through our API to include hostnames. This has been an often requested feature which we've been working towards delivering at scale for some time, the reason it has taken us so long is because of the unique challenges presented by hostname data, such as:

1. Because IPs have unique hostnames we cannot share hostname data across a large range of addresses like other data.
2. Performing hostname lookups live to DNS servers as you perform an API request has a huge latency penalty (sometimes 1 sec+).
3. There are billions of addresses we need to cache the hostnames for and the data must be synchronised across all our servers.

So to deliver on this feature we had to think very carefully, solve a few technical hurdles and perform a lot of testing. Hurting the API's responsiveness was the biggest concern we had going into this as we knew the data would be very large and cause a lot of in-memory cache misses that would result in expensive database queries.

So how are we accomplishing hostnames at scale?

Firstly, to tackle the latency issue we're going to cache the hostnames for every IPv4 address and through some clever compression we've devised we're able to get our hostname database to a small size while also making it extremely efficient to read from and write to. As a result, in our testing there is no measurable impact on the latency of the API.

Secondly, we're not going to perform live lookups of the hostnames we don't have cached. This won't impact IPv4 lookups as we intend to cache 100% of them at all times but for IPv6 this represents a hurdle that we're still working on. The issue with IPv6 addresses is the IPv6 address pool is so large that we cannot pre-compute them.

One option we explored was compressing the IPv6 addresses into contiguous ranges but that leads to inaccuracies in the data and still leaves an unfathomably large amount of data to cache and synchronise. So for the time being IPv6 will have experimental support only which means if we do have a hostname available for an IPv6 address we'll present it but don't count on these being available.

So let's show you how it looks on a live API result, we've got two outputs in the screenshot below and we've highlighted only the new hostname data in both.

To have hostnames show you'll need to either supply &asn=1 with your requests or utilise a hostname as a condition in your custom rules. If we don't have a hostname for an IP address it simply won't show one in the API output just like with our other data.

So that's the update for today, we know a lot of you have been waiting for this feature, we've had many requests for it over the years and it has taken some considerable time to deliver this for you but today the wait is at least partially over, we're still working on broad IPv6 support for this feature and hopefully we'll have an update for you on that later this year.

Thanks for reading and have a great week.

Since we introduced Custom Rules in 2019 it has continued to be one of our most popular features and as customers have become more familiar with it and we've expanded its feature set we're now seeing some customers with upwards of 100 custom rules in their account.

Last year we improved the interface for these power users by introducing the ability to hide deactivated rules and also search for rules based not only on their name but their rule content which includes searching both condition and output values.

Today we're adding another power user feature, dividers. This feature allows you to add dividers between and above rules so that you can visually separate rules that have different use cases. You can add as many separators as you like and we let you both name them and set the color of your dividers individually. Below is an example of how the feature looks when you've added a few dividers.

We wanted to make dividers very easy to use so you can simply click on the name of a divider to change it and drag the dividers around to move them like you can with rules. We also didn't want them to look visually cluttered so you only see the divider control buttons when you mouse over a divider like below.

And finally, we wanted you to be able to customise your dividers not just by name but with any color and level of transparency that you want. To that end, we've added a real-time full spectrum color picker which you'll see if you click on the Color button as shown below.

So that's the update for today, it's live in everyone's Dashboard right now and we hope you have a lovely weekend.

Today we've added a new feature to our API, CIDR ranges. This change allows you to see the ranges present when you check an IPv4 or IPv6 address on the API which has been an often-requested feature and one that provides greater insight into network route sizes and helps in potentially blocking undesirable peers from accessing your services.

If you've used our custom list feature you may have seen the sample text we populate these lists with which contains entries such as:

123.45.214.0/24 #My Home VPN Providers IP Range

2001:4860:4860::ffff/64 #My Work VPN Providers IP Range

These are CIDR ranges which help to specify a range of addresses within a group. For example, the first range above has /24 at the end which means there are 256 addresses in this range between 123.45.214.0 and 123.45.214.255.

By having these ranges displayed in our API results and threat pages it will help users to quickly add a specific range of addresses to a custom list. This can be useful if you want to stop a specific user who keeps changing IP address within their internet service provider's supplied DHCP range from accessing your services.

We think this change will be well received and it is live as of today through a new API version dated January 22nd 2024. If you're already set to use the latest version of the API (which is the default in our customer dashboard) you will have this feature available in your API results as of this post.

In addition to this news, we've also made a change to the emails that you receive when your plan is nearing expiration. Before today we would send you an email which explained you could visit the dashboard on our website to start a new plan if desired.

As of last week these emails are now vendor-aware so if you've purchased a paid plan through a 3rd-party vendor you will now be recommended to revisit that vendor to renew your plan with an appropriate link being provided. These vendors sometimes offer discounted or bundled pricing so it's a good deal to renew through them and the plans bought through 3rd-party vendors in this way help to fund more end-user software that integrates our API for the benefit of all customers.

Thanks for reading and have a wonderful week!

At the end of each year, we like to look back and discuss some of the significant changes that happened to our service and this year we focused heavily on our physical infrastructure.

We started early on April 14th by introducing QUASAR and PULSAR, which are our first South Asian server nodes.

These servers were very important because until this time all the traffic that originated in Asia was being served by our European infrastructure which introduced higher-than-desired latency. We had trialled many different servers from many different hosting providers and datacenters until we settled on these and over the past 8 months they've worked diligently.

We followed this up just four days later on April 18th with the first major refresh of our American infrastructure. We swapped out our LETO node for LUNAR. This increased performance and set a new benchmark for our servers in the North American region going forward.

Then eight days after that on April 26th we introduced both SATURN and JUPITER as new North American nodes. This time we didn't replace any current nodes for that region as we had long-term leases on our other older servers so we kept CRONUS, METIS and NYX until between July and September, all of those older servers are now retired.

These three new North American nodes increased our performance so much that we reduced our footprint from four servers to three while more than quadrupling our per-second request capacity.

And with that final hardware update, we were now running the latest and fastest hardware in all regions and that gave us the confidence to increase our query limits from 125 requests per second to 200 requests per second per node and per customer in all regions.

Of course, other changes happened in supporting of our physical architecture, we re-designed the way our servers share and correlate database updates which made features like our new stats graph with per-minute resolution possible. We made some blog posts about both of those things, we also were able to lower our average query latency which gave us an extra buffer to introduce more data to the API like currencies and more detailed and accurate location data.

As we close out the year, the main thing that happened this year that makes me personally happy is our South Asian server nodes. It's no secret if you have followed the blog for the past several years that we have been trying to get servers in Asia that had the network connectivity we needed, the processing power we required and a price that made sense. So being able to finally reach that goal with hardware that will last us many years was a great achievement.

I also want to give one shout-out to the power user improvements we made this year, not only the new high-resolution stats graph already mentioned above but also making Custom Rules and Custom Lists fully searchable. Such a simple concept but it works so well and saves so much time, especially for our most heavy users who have a lot of content in their dashboards.

Thank you to everyone who uses our services for a wonderful 2023, we're looking forward to what 2024 brings!