Proxy tier benchmark › Protection systems
What is the CloudFront 'request could not be satisfied' block?
Amazon CloudFront's stock refusal — "ERROR: The request could not be satisfied. 403 ERROR. Request blocked." — appears three times in this census, byte-identical each time at 553 characters of text. It is a refusal by network, made at the edge before the origin sees the request, and it is the only defence in the study that a proxy tier reliably defeated.
Portals behind CloudFront 403 in this census
Sixty-one candidate URLs were probed once each from a clean US datacenter IP on 2026-08-18; 1 of the portals below were then measured through all six proxy arms, ten rounds each.
| Portal | Measured in | Behaviour |
|---|---|---|
us_ar_sos_search |
six-arm run | 403 on 39 of 60 requests including all 10 unproxied; residential scored 100%, 10 of 10, on the real 18.7 KB page |
us_il_cook_prop |
census probe only | 403, 553 characters — excluded, robots.txt unreadable from both User-Agents |
uk_national_lottery |
census probe only | 403, 553 characters — excluded, robots.txt unreadable from both User-Agents |
The one target of 32 where the tier decided the outcome
Arkansas is the whole case for a residential tier in this study, and it is worth stating precisely because it is a single target out of thirty-two.
| direct | datacenter (pinned) | datacenter (rotating) | anti-detect (pinned) | anti-detect (rotating) | residential |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0% | 0% | 0% | 30% | 20% | 100% |
The fingerprint helped and was not enough; the exit network decided it. At 18,718 bytes per successful page, one thousand pages cost $0.09-$0.17 across the published residential pack ladder.
Rotation was not the variable: the residential arm rotated per request and the datacenter arms scored identically pinned and rotating.
The 405 that is not a client bug
Six of Arkansas's 60 requests returned HTTP 405 Method Not Allowed to a GET, with a 2.5 KB captcha body. A 405 to a GET reads like a coding mistake and will be filed as one by most scrapers. It is the WAF, answering with a status that discourages investigation.
Run date: 2026-08-18 · All protection systems · All 32 benchmarked targets · Full report · Census data
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