Blocked is not broken
A proxy that passes every tester can still be refused by one site. How to tell a block from a fault, in two steps.
Blocked is not broken
This is the single most common misunderstanding in our support inbox, and it costs people hours.
A proxy that fails on one site is usually not a broken proxy. It passes every proxy tester, the connection is fine, and the target site still turns it away. Testers only prove the proxy answers. They cannot know whether a shop, a ticketing site or a social network has decided to refuse that address.
**Step one: is the address alive at all?** Paste it into the proxy tester. It answers exactly one question, and it answers it in seconds: does the address respond, how fast, and which exit address does the world see. If it comes back working, the proxy is not your problem.
Step two: does the site let it through? Open the site tester on the buy page, paste the URL you care about, and we route a real request through our own proxies in each country. A green tick means the site let us through from there. A red cross means that location is the problem.
Working in the first tester and refused by the site is not a contradiction. It is the normal shape of a block.
What to do when it is a block. Pick a country that gets through. If your own addresses are the ones being refused, report them and we look at the range, that is what the report form on the ISP page is for.
Note: A site can block one address and accept the next one in the same range, and it can change its mind from one day to the next. That is normal, and it is why we replace addresses rather than promise that every site works forever.
