Proxy usage policy for business teams

1. Purpose, and how it fits with our other terms

This policy describes how the Cheapest Proxies network should be used in everyday business work. Read it together with our Acceptable Use Policy: the AUP lists what is allowed and what is forbidden, and this page turns that list into working habits for the people on your account. It also covers our position on traffic logs and the way our IP pools are sourced. Using our datacenter, residential, mobile or residential premium proxies means accepting this guidance alongside our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. If colleagues or contractors share an account, make sure each of them has read it.

2. What we expect from every account

A shared network keeps working for all customers only while each account uses it with care. The rest of this policy rests on four expectations:

• Lawful work only. Run activity that is legal for your business, for us and for every site or service your requests reach.
• Respect for other people’s systems. Treat the websites you connect to the way you would want your own storefront or servers treated.
• Clear ownership. Your organisation is responsible for the legitimacy of every task run through its account, and for what that task leads to.
• Considerate sharing. Plan workloads so that one team’s activity does not degrade the service for other customers.

3. Each site’s robots.txt and terms come first

Before anyone on your team connects to a third-party website or collects data from it, they should check the rules that site sets and keep to them:

• Check the site's robots.txt file and any crawling guidance it documents, and set your tools to honour both.
• Have someone read the terms of service before a project starts, paying attention to any limits on automated access.
• Gather business data only inside the limits that those terms and the applicable law set.
• Where an official API exists, build the workflow on it rather than on the site's public pages.

For us this is a condition of service: an account that ignores these rules is in breach of this policy.

4. Pacing requests and avoiding overload

Heavy request volumes strain the sites you reach and are a common reason for sessions being blocked. Keep every workflow within sensible limits:

• Set request rates in your tools so that no target’s servers come under strain.
• Leave delays between requests, and slow down whenever a site returns rate-limit or error responses.
• Base concurrency on what the target can comfortably handle, not on the maximum your software allows.
• Run large jobs at considerate times, and pause them if a site starts responding slowly or with errors.

We do not claim that proxies will stop a platform from restricting access. Steady, respectful request rates are what keep scheduled monitoring and reporting running week after week.

5. Which destinations are allowed

Where your team’s traffic goes matters as much as how it gets there. As a working guide:

• Permitted targets are lawful websites and services your team is authorised to use, where the terms of service allow the activity in question. Examples include public pages used for market research, your own sites (or a client’s, with permission) for testing, and platforms used in line with their rules.
• Prohibited targets are systems your team has no authorisation to access, sites whose terms forbid what you plan to do, and anything tied to the unlawful conduct our Acceptable Use Policy lists.

When the status of a destination is unclear, treat it as off limits until its terms have been checked and, where access is restricted, permission has been given.

6. Unlawful activity is never permitted

Our proxies must not be pointed at illegal targets or used to support unlawful activity in any form. That includes everything on the prohibited list in our Acceptable Use Policy, for example unauthorised access to systems, fraud, malware distribution, attacks on networks and infrastructure, or accessing illegal content. Using a proxy does not change whether an activity is legal.

7. Client accounts and platform terms

Many teams use proxies while managing their own or their clients’ accounts on third-party platforms. That does not alter anything your team has agreed with those platforms, and account decisions stay with the platform, whichever proxy you use. Your team remains bound by the terms of service of every platform it works on and is responsible for staying inside them. Restrictions, limits or suspensions that a platform applies to an account are a matter between the account holder and that platform. Our service carries no warranty against them, and they do not point to a fault on our side.

8. Personal data and GDPR duties

When your team collects or processes personal data through our network, your organisation is the controller of that data and is solely responsible for meeting every applicable data-protection law, including the UK GDPR and the EU GDPR where they apply. In practice that means a lawful basis for each use, honouring the rights of the people involved, keeping stored data secure and respecting the terms of each source. Our role is limited to providing the connection: we do not direct, review or control what your team gathers.

9. No logs of your traffic

We do not record what your team sends through the proxies. The only data we hold is what running the account requires, such as billing records and operational details, as set out in our Privacy Policy. Two things follow from that. Responsibility for lawful, terms-compliant use rests with your organisation, and if misuse is reported, the investigation depends on the evidence supplied through our Abuse Reporting Policy rather than on logs of our own.

10. A consent-based IP supply

Our residential and mobile (4G/5G) pools are built from real users who chose to take part in the network, under ethical, consent-based arrangements. A clean supply chain protects the people behind the IPs as well as the reputation of every business that relies on them. Please use these addresses in that spirit, for legitimate professional work that stays within each target site's terms.

11. Bandwidth, metering and fair use

Each order is a block of gigabytes valid for a fixed 30 days, and the network those gigabytes run on is shared by every customer. To protect quality for all of them, we apply a fair-use approach. Avoid patterns that abuse shared infrastructure or try to work around metering, and do not run activity that ties up capacity at other customers’ expense. Where an account’s usage threatens the stability of the network, we may contact the account holder to adjust it, or throttle or suspend the activity causing harm.

12. If the policy is breached

We treat any breach of this policy as a breach of our Acceptable Use Policy, and the response depends on severity: a warning, throttling or suspension of the proxies or account concerned, or, for serious or repeated misuse, closure of the account. Closure for a violation comes with no refund under our Refund & Replacement Policy, and unlawful activity may be passed to the relevant authorities.

13. Seen misuse? Tell us

If you notice our network being misused, including by someone outside your own team, please report it so we can investigate and act. The Abuse Reporting Policy lists the details a useful report includes and the address to send it to. The more specific the evidence and the sooner it arrives, the faster we can respond.

14. Updates to this policy

When this policy changes in a material way, the "Last updated" date at the top of the page changes with it. We revise the text as the service and the wider environment develop, so check the date from time to time; using the service after an update counts as accepting the new version.

15. Check with us before a new project

If you are unsure whether a planned workflow fits this policy, ask before it starts, through our contact page or at info@cheapest-proxies.com. We would rather review a workflow with you at the planning stage than enforce the policy once a campaign is live.