This started with a throwaway comment in a group chat. Someone said my IP risk score was too high. I replied something like "what is that, another scare tactic from proxy sellers?" Then on a slow Saturday afternoon I checked the node I used every day.
78 out of 100. I did not know if that was high or low, but the red bar on the page made it pretty clear this was not a good number.
What a risk score actually is
A friend who knows more than me explained it in a way that stuck: think of a credit score, but for an IP address. The higher it is, the more stuff that address has been involved in. Spam, fake signups, being shared by hundreds of people, complaints. A low score does not make an IP trustworthy, but a high score usually means the address is dirty.
You are almost never the only person on an IP. Cheap proxy pools can put dozens or hundreds of users behind the same exit. One runs bots, one makes throwaway accounts, one does something worse. It all gets attached to that address. By the time you rent it, the reputation is already there.
I thought I was fine
My node was fast, low latency, never dropped. I made an account on it and the first two weeks were normal. In the third week, views sat around 300 no matter what I posted. I assumed my content was bad and deleted three videos. That was dumb.
Then I switched nodes, posted similar stuff, and got two or three thousand views. That was when I connected the dots. Nothing was wrong with the videos. I had just moved out of a building with a bad reputation.
The whole reason I ended up reading about residential versus datacenter IPs was this one week.
How I check now
I look at a few things, roughly in this order:
- Residential or datacenter. Datacenter is an instant no unless I only need it for reading.
- Risk score and blacklist history. Too high, I walk away.
- Which city it claims, and whether that matches the account's target region.
- Whether the exit is shared. Shared pools are cheap, but you have no idea who was there before you.
I use this lookup page for the basics and the proxy check to see if it behaves like a proxy. A minute per node, back and forth.
Can you fix a bad score?
My experience says no, just replace it. You cannot clean an IP's history. People say let it "rest." I tried. I left a 70-something node alone for two weeks and it came back at 70-something. These things do not forget.
The account carries its own baggage too. After I changed IPs, nothing happened for another week or so. Views only recovered gradually. Do not expect a new IP to fix everything overnight.
Obvious advice that I ignored
Check the score before you buy, not after the account dies. If I had spent one minute before paying, I could have skipped three weeks of guessing. Now when I see "nine dollars a month, US native," my first thought is not "cheap." It is "let me look that up first."