Find answers to common questions about Node4.io proxy services, billing, and technical details.
Still Have Questions?
Our support team is here to help. Reach out and we'll get back to you within 24 hours.
How do I create an account?
Sign up with an email address and a password from any page on the site, then confirm the address from the message we send. Confirming is what releases the free allocation, so it is worth doing straight away rather than later. There is no sales call, no card and no approval step in between.
Is there a free trial?
Every verified account gets 3 free shared proxies with 1 GB/month bandwidth and 10 concurrent threads, with no card and no expiry. It exists so you can point your own code at your own target before deciding what to buy, which is the only test that settles which product you need. Upgrade when the allocation runs out, or when the target turns out to refuse hosting ranges and you need residential.
How quickly can I start using proxies?
Immediately. Credentials are generated when the subscription is created, so there is no provisioning queue and nothing to wait for. The step people forget is confirming the email address on the account: an unconfirmed account gets no allocation and no credentials.
What protocols do you support?
HTTP(S) and SOCKS5, on every paid product, using the same credential for both. There is no second username to manage, because the gateway identifies you by username rather than by protocol. Free tier accounts are HTTP(S) only.
What are Premium Datacenter Proxies?
Dedicated addresses from IP blocks node4 owns and announces, totaling thousands of IPs. Owning the blocks is what puts allocation, subnet spread and reputation under our control rather than a supplier's, and it means nobody else is selling the address assigned to you. It is checkable before you buy: run whois on an address we hand you, and on one your current provider hands you, and compare what comes back. Nothing meters the traffic on this product, so a heavy month costs what a light one costs.
What's the difference between residential and datacenter proxies?
A datacenter proxy comes from a hosting provider's IP range: cheap, low-latency, and identifiable as hosting, which is why some sites reject the whole range on sight. A residential proxy routes through a real consumer connection, so it is much harder to tell apart from an ordinary visitor, at the cost of per-gigabyte billing and more variable latency. Which one you need is a property of your target rather than a preference: send the same request through both and let the response decide.
Can I use multiple proxy types on one account?
Yes. One account can hold subscriptions to several products at once, managed from the same dashboard, and the entitlement follows the products you hold rather than the credential you use. Mixing is often the cheaper arrangement: bulk work on datacenter addresses, and residential reserved for the targets that actually refuse hosting ranges.
Do you offer sticky sessions?
Yes, on residential and on both rotating tiers. Every request leaves from a different exit by default; add a session ID to your proxy username and requests carrying that ID keep the same exit, which is what logins, carts and other multi-step flows need. Pick any string of letters and digits up to 32 characters. On rotating shared and rotating premium a session holds one exit for up to 30 minutes, counted from when the exit is first assigned rather than from your latest request. On residential the hold is best effort, because exits are real consumer connections and the address can change when the device behind it goes offline. Change the ID and you are on a fresh exit immediately. The residential builder in the dashboard writes the username for you; on the rotating tiers you add the segment yourself.
Can I switch plans at any time?
Yes. Contact support and we will move you to the new plan and settle any difference for you. Self-service plan switching is not available yet, so we handle the change by hand to make sure your proxies and billing are both correct on the new plan.
What payment methods do you accept?
We accept credit and debit cards (Visa, Mastercard and American Express), PayPal, and cryptocurrency (Bitcoin and Lightning) via BTCPay. For enterprise billing arrangements, contact us.
What happens if I exceed my bandwidth?
We warn you as you approach your limit. Nothing is billed for overage you did not ask for: access pauses at the cap until you top up or the period renews, unless you have switched auto top-up on. You can top up from your dashboard at any time: packs are sized against your own plan, so they are proportionate to what you already buy rather than a fixed list.
Do you offer refunds?
Yes. First-time customers can request a full refund within 7 days of their initial purchase under our 7-day money-back guarantee. See our Refund & Cancellation Policy for full details, including how subscriptions and bandwidth add-ons are handled.
Do you offer discount codes?
Yes. A code is entered at checkout and applies as a percentage or a fixed amount off the subscription, and the reduced total is shown on the order before you pay rather than turning up on the invoice afterward. Codes are issued for particular campaigns rather than standing permanently, so there is not a general one to hunt for.
Do you have an API?
Yes: a REST API at https://node4.io/api/v1 with Bearer token authentication, covering proxy generation, usage figures, IP whitelist management and account state. The reference is public in the help center at /help/proxy-management-api, and the machine-readable specification is served at /openapi.json, so you can generate a client before you have an account.
What authentication methods do you support?
We support two authentication methods: username/password credentials and IP whitelisting. Username/password is the default method; credentials are generated automatically with your proxy subscription. Alternatively, on the static datacenter products (shared and dedicated) and on all three rotating gateways (shared, premium and unmetered) you can whitelist individual IPv4 addresses from the Settings page to authenticate without credentials, and both methods can be used simultaneously. On rotating there is a second option worth knowing: send your username with an EMPTY password. The username is where your country and sticky-session controls are carried, so this keeps your targeting while leaving the secret out of config files and shell history; sending nothing at all is also fine and gives you an untargeted exit. The residential gateway accepts whitelisting as well, with one difference: there you send no username and no password at all, which gives an untargeted exit that rotates freely across the pool. Its country, city and session targeting ride in the username, so a request that needs targeting still uses credentials. Our proxy endpoints are IPv4, so the address to whitelist is the one your machine uses for IPv4 traffic.
What uptime do you target?
We target 99.9% uptime on Premium Datacenter Proxies. It is a target rather than a service-level commitment, and the Terms of Service set out what we do and do not undertake. Automated health checks probe every provider every 5 minutes and alert us to degradation, and the current state of each product is on the status page.
How does proxy rotation work?
It depends on the product. Residential and both rotating tiers hand you a different exit on every request, unless you add a session segment to the username, which holds one exit for that session. Dedicated and shared datacenter addresses are static: they keep their IP until you refresh it, which you can do from the dashboard or through the API.
What are the rate limits?
Public API: 60 requests per minute per API key, applied as one flat bucket rather than varying by plan. Dashboard: 120 requests per minute per session. Sign-in and password endpoints: 10 per minute, which is brute-force protection rather than a product limit. These are the figures the limiter itself is configured with, and none of them caps the requests you send through the proxies.
How do you protect my data?
The dashboard and the API are TLS-only. Proxy traffic over HTTPS runs as an opaque CONNECT tunnel, so the TLS session is between your client and the destination and we relay encrypted bytes without terminating them. Accounts authenticate by password, and additionally by IP whitelist on every product, team access is split across four roles, and API keys are scoped and individually revocable.
Can I create multiple API keys?
Yes, each with its own scopes (read:proxies, write:proxies, read:usage and the rest), so a key issued to a script that only reads usage cannot create proxies. Any key can be revoked on its own without disturbing the others, which is what makes rotating one safe to do in the middle of a working day.
Do you log proxy traffic?
We log bandwidth usage and connection metadata for billing and analytics purposes. We do not inspect, log, or store the content of your proxy traffic.