I run a SearXNG instance and rate limiting has never been a issue until now. so i wanted to ask what the cheapest and most privacy respecting vpn/proxys are to use.
Can you explain a bit more about the setup?
Like would just using a VPS with pangolin secure tunnel work? Or does it have to be a vpn for some other reason?
Asking because maybe the question really boils down to the VPS provider with the best data transfer rates
So like, if you passed on the rate limiting to your users, would you get less rate limited from the search providers that SearXNG uses?
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web IP Internet Protocol VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) nginx Popular HTTP server
5 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 8 acronyms.
[Thread #139 for this comm, first seen 6th Mar 2026, 20:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Keep it private only to yourself? I do this, and never been rate limited.
i want to keep it public is the thing
Take this with a grain of salt since I haven’t done much scraping (yet; I have a project I just started planning)
I’ve heard you’re more likely to get blocked for using a VPN since some sites will block requests originating from data centers, which is less likely to happen coming from a residential IP address. (Although if you’re already using a VPS, the right proxy may help)
This might be useless advice, but it might just be best to increase (and randomize) the amount of time between requests.
And to answer your question, Mullvad is what I use, and it’s what I see reccomended (from both Reddit, and The Wirecutter) the most often because they store so little of your data, and you can even pay in cash.
i use a vps so ill see if somthing like mullvad could work thanks.
On the vpn/proxy idk, I think the bots would pass through it.
There are some nginx blocklists like the ultimate bad bot blocker, I could share my Cloudflare rules if you want it, as these are rules, it can be abstracted to anywhere.
Nginx also has support for rate limiting built in.
On the topic of blocking, I block useragents starting with
Mozilla/5.0that are using HTTP/1.X, since all modern browsers default to HTTP/2.0 and anything else is usually always bad bots. You can also return 426 with theUpgrade: h2cheader to let some older browsers know to use HTTP/2.0.
