Proxy tier benchmark › Targets

Do you need a proxy for the Rhode Island corporate search?

State business entity registries · minimum viable tier: no proxy needed · measured 2026-08-18

No. The Rhode Island business portal's corporate search returned the expected content on 60 of 60 requests — 100% on every one of the six configurations, including unproxied. Rhode Island is one of only three state business registries out of twenty-two probed that serve content to a plain datacenter fetch. Measured 2026-08-18.

What was measured
URL https://business.sos.ri.gov/CorpWeb/CorpSearch/CorpSearch.aspx
Content assertion RI Business Portal
Arms 6
Rounds per arm 10
Requests 60
Measured 2026-08-18, 15:38–18:09 UTC
Benchmark host DigitalOcean droplet, New York (nyc3)

A request counts as a success only if the expected content is present. An HTTP 200 carrying a challenge page, an empty body or the wrong page is a failure, because it is not a page you can use.

This measures whether a tier works, not long-run stability under sustained load. Ten requests per arm, at a two-second floor, never approach a per-IP rate limit — which is the thing a rotating pool exists to defeat.

Results by arm

Arm Success p50 p95 Bytes per success Outcomes
direct (no proxy) 100% 147 ms 5,127 ms 30,296 success 10
datacenter, one pinned exit 100% 809 ms 2,049 ms 30,296 success 10
datacenter, rotating exit 100% 544 ms 2,001 ms 30,296 success 10
anti-detect, one pinned exit 100% 816 ms 2,080 ms 45,875 success 10
anti-detect, rotating exit 100% 672 ms 861 ms 45,875 success 10
residential, rotating exit 100% 1,920 ms 3,381 ms 45,875 success 10

What protects this target

Nothing. A clean sweep across all six arms with no challenge signature, no 403 and no transport error.

The measurable effect on this target is a billing one, and it is the largest of its kind in the study. The unproxied and plain-datacenter arms received 30,296 bytes per page. The three arms carrying a browser fingerprint — anti-detect pinned, anti-detect rotating and residential -- received 45,875 bytes, a 51% increase, for content that matched the same assertion.

Small byte differences between the plain and fingerprinted arms appear on four other targets in this run and are all under 15%. Rhode Island's is in a different range, and on a plan billed by traffic it is the difference between 0.030 GB and 0.046 GB per thousand pages. This study did not capture response headers, so what changed — content negotiation, compression, or a different page for browser-shaped clients — is not established here.

robots.txt status

The host serves no robots.txt — the request returns HTTP 404. Nothing is disallowed, and nothing is granted either.
Status allowed
File https://business.sos.ri.gov/robots.txt
Crawl-delay not declared
Fetched as the benchmark's own User-Agent
Note no robots.txt (HTTP 404)

Limits of this result

  • The search page was measured, not a submitted query.
  • Response headers were not recorded, so the cause of the byte difference between the plain and fingerprinted arms is not identified.
  • Ten rounds per arm in a single three-hour window on 2026-08-18. Anti-bot behaviour drifts; a result older than a few months is a historical record, not a current one.
  • One exit geography. Every request left from a US datacenter host or a US exit, so nothing here describes how this target answers traffic from elsewhere.
  • The unproxied arm ran from a clean, previously unused cloud IP with no accumulated reputation. It is a best case a production scraper will not sustain.

Run date: 2026-08-18 · Full benchmark report · Harness and raw data · All 32 targets

The 60 rows behind this page are in results/six-arm/raw.csv; filter them with grep '^[^,]*,us_ri_corpsearch,' raw.csv.

Test your own target

The result above describes one URL on one day. Paste your own URL into the live tester and see the real response before creating an account.

Test your target See plans