HideMyAss proxy service has a wonderful feature called “Scheduled IP Change” that automatically changes your IP address at set time intervals. This may help you greatly if you are trying to scrape a website that may block the IP address you use for scraping. But does this feature work as good as it is stated? Recently we have got the following testimony of one of our visitors:

HMA is disconnecting, also even though they offer an auto IP change of around 45 seconds, and we tried to use that time, they suspended my account because we were getting multiple connections, that is they were trying to open a new connection before the other one had closed (their problem not mine?) they allow you 5 connections (please note I am not a programmer I am only the guy paying the bills, some of my terminology may be a little incorrect). They told me I was using  multiple servers, I have 2x VPS ONLY.

While my account was suspended they did message me that the above was what was happening and could we “slow down the change over a time a bit !!” or buy 10 extra connections.
I have purchased the 10 extra connections now and I will slow down the change over time down to 1.5 minutes, but we were only using what they offered, i have lost some confidence with them…”

We suggested him using Proxify® SwitchProxy™ for these purposes, and he answered: “I will keep it in mind though, at present HMA is working ok, the extra 10 connections have been paid for and we have had no crashes for the last 48 hours”. But after about 10 days he wrote us again:

We still had problems, advised HMA of this, told them what was wrong at their end. They had a look and agreed that they had a problem and would write some new software (I think that is what they said anyway, i am not a programmer).

Conclusion

We hope that this experience may help you in choosing the proxy service. Though HideMyAss is really nice, probably it’s still not very good for high-speed requests. In this case we recommend using a special proxy service like Proxify® SwitchProxy™.

But if you have a good experience with HMA or you know any other great proxy service for high-speed automated scraping we’d like to hear you in the comments!

Thanks.